


Piter Raw

by pennypaperbrain



Series: Four Corners of the Western World [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action/Adventure, BDSM, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Dom John, Homophobia, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Psychological Drama, Sub Sherlock, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:57:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 41,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two of Moriarty's snipers are now dead, and Sherlock and John must travel to St Petersburg, Russia, to take on the last and toughest: mafioso Oleg Kolyvanov. Hardly a simple task, and the fact that Sherlock is increasingly ill makes their chances even slimmer...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to my betas Chloe and Eldritch-horrors, and russpicker Madoshi!
> 
> Now with [setlock](http://pennypaperbrain.tumblr.com/post/83437060988/four-corners-of-the-western-world-piter-raw-set) images.

**Prologue: mid-December**

**Sherlock**

St Petersburg is a vast white darkness and Sherlock drifts through it like a blackened ghost.

Other pedestrians are indistinct bulks of coat. Around them: swirling snow, glimpses of buildings, speeding battered cars, and a _size_ to everything as Sherlock weaves his hesitant way down a pavement piled with icy rubble and into the maw of the Metro.

Detail, the foundation of deduction, blurs and fades in this weather. It is weather of the environment and of the mind. Sherlock is compact and mute, uncoupled from himself. Even the escalators are huge. He is being carried a hundred metres down, beneath the swamps on which St Petersburg is built.

Quantifiable negatives – their near-capture, John’s anger – are suspended for the moment. As Sherlock travels in mobile limbo, he commits the error of engaging with the sourceless distress which John tells him is chemical imbalance but is more compellingly identified as dissolution of the soul. This soul is an alien artefact identified by John, and dedicated to John, and rejected by John.

For the first time in his life, the pain stops his mind. Without reflection or defence he travels downwards, and when screens on poles beside the escalator flash ads for luxury apartments, the colours and glyphs signify nothing.

The pain of disconnection is incomprehensibly vast. And therefore not quite real, not quite serious. He breathes, curious and split. Numb/agony.

When he hits bottom and moves his limbs he is... Sherlock Holmes. He does still have that. Body and name.

The station is immaculate, crisp marble, as clean and defined as his thoughts are not. It echoes to the coming of a train. The metalwork lettering fixed to the wall matches the Cyrillic names Sherlock saw on the map: he has not got lost. He is glad of that competence, and too far gone to be embarrassed by his gladness. Horror bangs itself against the glass inside his head. John is angry with him. He is hunted by men with guns. He cannot remember what the fight is. The fight is moment by moment to continue. He is not able to protest – the thick, thick glass. In his head.

The tannoy: ‘ _Ostorozhno, dveri zakrivayutsa_!’ Words do not mean.

The train whisks him away, beneath frozen St Petersburg.

  


**Chapter 1: A few days earlier**

**John**

They are in a taxi, bumping over potholes as they travel the ten miles from Pulkovo International Airport to central St Petersburg. It’s sleeting hard, and outside, underneath the covering of snow, John sees wide, badly-maintained carriageways, tacky billboards and huge, concrete blocks of flats strewn across the landscape like boulders. It seems there are no houses here; it’s a little like New York only spaced out. And bleaker. Yes, definitely that.

John turns to Sherlock, who is bending over a Russian phrasebook John bought earlier. Both of them are in touristy anoraks, with dyed-brown hair for John and clear-lensed glasses for Sherlock, but the most effective part of Sherlock’s disguise is that, increasingly, he doesn’t look like himself. If you peer into his eyes, it’s as if he isn’t fully there. This is different to his usual sulks. It’s stiller. It’s quiet. It terrifies. At the moment, he is avoiding John’s gaze. He doesn’t turn the pages of the book.

The cabbie is arguing with his radio in Russian. John is glad not to have to make conversation. He is speculating, again, about how long it might take for the lithium to kick in. Sherlock’s only been on the stuff for a few days, because soon after they opened his test results – all sufficiently clear – he started throwing up. He was down for a week while a virus rampaged through his knackered system, and then it jumped over to John. Thank God John was less badly affected, as he would not have wanted Sherlock to have had to play nurse. Since his temperature went down Sherlock has been spending more and more time lost in thought. His moods still swing, but now their range seems to be from agitation to numbness to despair.

What must it be like to lose your delusions of indestructibility so hard? John never had any. He remembers injured soldier boys trying to make sense of themselves with missing limbs, after lives lived for action. All he and Sherlock have is the cord between them, and it is strained by the fact that Sherlock is being driven mad by invisible pain. The thought of that is so horrible that John does not quite know what to do with it. Sometimes he brushes it aside, because how else to keep going?

He unfolds, again, the piece of paper with their destination. They’re staying on an unpronounceable street in the flat of one Zoya Andreevna Yevdokimova, a contact of a contact of Sherlock’s. For a non-trivial fee she’ll take in Sherlock and John, not inquire into their business, and just make out to the neighbours that she’s started doing homestays for tourists who want the authentic Russia. A private flat should be under Kolyvanov’s radar in the way that hotels aren’t.

‘Hoovered up half the phrasebook yet?’ John jokes to Sherlock, because the cabbie has unexpectedly shut up and there’s quiet, and it has an edge to it. ‘I’m crap at languages – got about three words of Pashto in total,’ he adds. He’s repeating himself, trying not to sound desperate, but he needs a reaction so he can gauge what’s going on. If Sherlock shuts down completely...

‘Not quite,’ Sherlock responds, almost formally. He closes the phrasebook and sits up in his seat, his profile dark against the older, more elegant yet still sometimes run-down buildings that are now marching along close by the side of the road. Normally he’d have rattled off dozens of minor deductions by now, and John wants to shout at him, _say something, be yourself!_

Instead Sherlock looks as if he’s listening. To something terrible, and far away. His long fingers tighten around the book and, watching them, John feels a flicker of longing. He tamps down on it.

John sees Sherlock swallow, and bring his hand up to slowly rub his throat. He’s been monosyllabic since they left Croatia, and John has mostly just let him be, because they can hardly bond on a plane or in a passport queue. Now, though, they are turning down a side street: shabby, lined with kiosks and bare-branched, snowy trees. They must be nearing their destination.

‘I am finding it difficult to retain new data,’ Sherlock says. ‘Effectively, I... I can’t read.’ He hands the phrasebook to John.

Oh.

That’s shocking. But John manages to keep the impact separate from him, like a grenade deflected to explode just out of range. It is, he knows, a not uncommon symptom of severe depression, and will, his online medical refresher reading tells him, clear up when the lithium takes effect. Which could be tomorrow, or a month from now. They just have to keep going. John has to stay supportive. Except right now, he doesn’t even want to risk a kiss, because what little he knows about the local culture suggests that they need to be hetero mates in public if they don’t want hassle or worse.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘They’ll all speak English anyway.’

The lightness of John's conversation reflects the fact that he doesn't actually know if their driver understands English or not. But Sherlock doesn’t seem to realise; he stiffens. John’s obviously pitched things wrong, again.

Now they’re drawing up outside a block that looks like some kind of former aristocratic residence. It still has a certain grace, with columns flanking the front, set into the wall, but it’s been divided into flats and painted an unattractive yellow.

The driver indicates that he wants cash, no doubt including a large tip. John fumbles the unfamiliar money, and Sherlock pulls himself together enough to get their baggage out onto the icy street. After an embarrassing amount of faff, the taxi drives off and they’re left clutching their suitcases like the tourists they pretend to be, and peering dubiously through a security gate into a dingy courtyard full of what seems to be snow-covered rubble. Is this whole city falling down?

Then something moves... and there’s a rather pretty woman in her early thirties, wearing some kind of embroidered dressing gown, picking her incongruous way through the mess. She’s giving them an intelligent, assessing look, not unfriendly.

‘ _Dobro pozhalovat v Piter!_ I see you from upstairs.’

A few seconds later she opens the gate. John goes to shake her hand. Behind him, he can hear a snort; he’s only surprised Sherlock doesn’t treat him to a comment about how the woman actually saw their dollars. Well, good: this is presumably Zoya, and they’re going to have to live with her. And in any case, John prefers to be friendly until given a reason not to.

‘Hello,’ he says when they’re a couple of feet from each other. He smiles, and Zoya smiles too. John is sure he can hear Sherlock’s eyes rolling. But if Sherlock can’t even read, then all the more reason to do things John’s way.

Ushered by their host, they pick-slide their way across the courtyard to a dank, graffitied entrance. John regards it dubiously; the building may be a classical relic, but the amount of graffiti and the level of disrepair would shame a London sink estate. At least the place isn’t short on security, with massive access-coded locks on the street gate and the staircase door.

‘Come on, come on,’ says Zoya encouragingly as Sherlock stops short of the door. He moves his head as if he’s sweeping the yard for visual details, but then seems to run out of impetus.

‘Culture shock,’ says John, nodding his head towards Sherlock.

Zoya smiles, mostly at Sherlock. Presumably she’s noticed how pretty he is. ‘Ah. Piter is quite a mix. Beautiful buildings, total mess. We try to live normally. Come inside and drink tea.’

John takes Sherlock by the arm. He gets shaken off for his troubles, but at least it’s a sign of life. They carry their bags up a dark, damp stairwell to a padded door on the third floor where Zoya opens another battery of locks before ushering them in to a warm, cosy space.

It’s a short, wide hallway, with doors radiating off it, and it’s lined with shelves. Stuff, and more stuff, much of it kitsch, from books to plates to Orthodox icons to dolls to lacquered boxes. John wonders if he should admire some of it, but can’t decide what.

‘This was communal apartment but now it’s ours,’ says Zoya. ‘This is my bedroom, and that’s Mama’s. This is for you.’ She points in turn to a shut door, one that’s slightly ajar, and an open one. John follows the direction of her final gesture and finds himself in a square space with two large ottomans and a TV, along with a dresser crammed in beside a radiator and bursting with more books and knick-knacks. There are carpets hanging on the wall. It looks like it’s normally a living room but gets repurposed for visitors.

‘Lovely,’ says John.

‘Small,’ replies Zoya, with an intonation that implies gentle correction. Then she whisks them on to the kitchen, which by western standards, looks to be on the point of septic disintegration.

‘You come and go as you like,’ says Zoya, and hands keys and papers to John. ‘Here are the lock numbers and keys. I cook breakfast. The neighbours think you are tourists who want budget Russia.’ She lowers her voice. ‘In fact, I don’t ask about what you do and you don’t bring bad people here, yes? You are _businessmen_.’ Her accent gets stronger on that word, as if it’s Russian, and John is at a loss to read what exactly she means... but he doesn’t have time to wonder about it, because he’s distracted by Sherlock, as is Zoya. Sherlock hasn’t yet said anything, but now he’s poking at a cracked wall tile, causing more bits to crumble off; then he takes out his magnifying glass and has a look at the point where the oven door doesn’t quite meet the frame.

OK... Sherlock must have livened up a bit, which is welcome, hence the shift into detective mode (though what is he looking for?), but so far they have one half-fledged friend in Russia, and Zoya is it. This is not the way to cultivate her. Sherlock is now all but inserting himself behind the boiler. He’s actually tasting the gunk that’s flaking off the side of a pipe.

‘What is he doing?’ Zoya demands.

‘Oh, he’s just a bit eccentric,’ says John, glaring furiously at Sherlock.

Sherlock finishes his sampling and turns slowly around. ‘One could synthesize several very interesting toxins from the by-products of the various decay processes underway in here,’ he says, with a nasty smirk. ‘Do try not to kill us with breakfast, Ms Yevdokimova. I won’t eat it anyway, of course, but I suspect my colleague will.’

Dear God. John has seen that expression before, if not since, well, things happened. Sherlock is cockblocking him. He actually thinks that is a useful activity, and apparently has the spare energy for it, right here and right now.

Zoya’s gone red. ‘As you like, Mr Jones,’ she says awkwardly, using Sherlock’s cover name. ‘You are guests here and I cook for you.’

‘Yes, and I’m sure it will be lovely,’ says John hastily and firmly. ‘Very kind of you to offer. We won’t get in your way while we’re here.’

That earns John a dubious look, though Zoya soon switches it to Sherlock. John considers himself good at charming women, but it’s not going to work if his idiot partner undoes everything he tries.

‘Well, you can settle in now,’ says Zoya. ‘I’m a fitness coach, so I work on shifts at a tourist hotel, and I have to go. You came late.’

John nods, and follows Zoya out into the cramped passage, trying to think. They must _not_ alienate this person: he knows, even if Sherlock doesn’t, that they can’t begin to understand how this city works without help, and maybe she can at least point them the right way.

Zoya is at the coat rail by the door, donning snow gear.

‘Thanks,’ says John. Then on impulse he adds, in a much lower voice, ‘I’m sorry about Sherlock. He’s a bit, ah...’ John taps the side of his head and lets some of the real sadness he feels on that score bleed into his expression.

Zoya seems to see it. There’s a softening in her face. ‘I see. No fun for you,’ she says. Then she’s gone, leaving John with the odd feeling that he just shared more than he should have done. Especially as he can sense Sherlock behind him.

‘What did you say that for?’ Sherlock demands.

Oh, Christ. As if it isn’t obvious. _Why_ does John always have to do damage limitation? He marches them into their carpet-walled room, shuts the door, and sits on one of the embroidered ottomans.

‘Because I need to stop you screwing up our relationship with the landlady before it even exists.’ He’s leaving aside the extent to which _He’s a bit... tap-tap_ is the literal truth. Can’t face that at the moment. ‘We can’t afford to piss her off for no reason.’

‘I suppose you trust her because she smiles at you?’ Sherlock scoffs.

John presses a hand to his forehead. ‘No, I don’t. Or maybe I do trust her. Your contact put us onto her, and I assume that was for a reason. You said she’s from a mob family but doesn’t want to live that life, yes? That would explain why she’s living in this dump and needs money. So do you see a better option than trusting her? Maybe you found one behind the boiler?’

‘I was checking the place for surveillance kit, John.’ As if to prove this, Sherlock starts on an investigative circuit of their room. ‘I may not be able to learn Russian overnight but I can still spot a hidden camera. Clearly you were too busy checking out our hostess to think about anything like that. And I concur with your analysis to this extent at least: Zoya Yevdokimova is possessed of female sexual characteristics.’

So it really does come down to that then, and all of about ten minutes after they arrive in Petersburg. ‘Sherlock,’ says John, trying to sound calm, or at least long-suffering rather than actually angry, because he really doesn’t want to be angry, he’s just... tired. ‘Please tell me you are not such a colossal tit as to be jealous of me exchanging a few words with a pretty woman.’

There is a silence. Sherlock, who is standing on the ottoman to peer behind the dresser and almost shoving his crotch in John’s face, patently is that much of a tit. In a way, John loves him for it, just not very much.

‘You’re hopeless,’ mutters John. He gets up, dodges a leg and stomps to the other side of the room, which is all of about five feet away. Presumably Sherlock is feeling a bit better now they’ve arrived, but why does the silly arse have to use that in the most negative way possible?

John expects a smart response, but all he gets is the spectacle of Sherlock scrutinising his way along the pelmet. It’s such a normal thing, really – Sherlock being rude, then scouring a stranger’s flat – that John could so easily just lose bloody patience. He can’t afford that though, so he takes a deep breath and reminds himself that they need to concentrate on surviving, not bickering, because Sherlock actually can’t ‘retain data’. (What the fuck? They are exactly how screwed now?) No wonder he wants to focus on basic logical things he can do, like searching a room.

God, he must be terrified. Which would explain why the arsehole act’s been turned up to eleven.

‘Sherlock, you said you can’t read,’ says John abruptly. ‘Exactly how bad is it? I need to know.’ Now they are alone together, medical terminology crowds his head – _receptive aphasia? Cognitive dysfunction?_ – as if dressing the situation up in words is going to help.

Sherlock turns and jumps off the ottoman. He’s not as nimble as usual, and seems almost to turn his ankle before catching himself. John pretends not to see, realising too late that Sherlock will know he’s pretending and fuck, this is horrible.

‘I can understand English if I stare at it,’ says Sherlock, feeling along the underside of the windowsill. ‘New information won’t stay in my mind. I cannot, for example, memorise the Cyrillic alphabet.’

John nods, although Sherlock has his back to him. Sherlock is explaining something that would be so very painful to him, and doing it so pragmatically, that John swings between fear and not quite being able to believe what Sherlock says. He’s been through four months of grieving, then the madness of Malta, and now he’s losing Sherlock again? It just can’t be. He will not let it.

‘You’re not short of words when you feel the need,’ John says. ‘You’re still going.’

Sherlock starts poking at the crevices around the doorframe. ‘Willpower,’ he says. ‘I deduce what logically needs to be done and I do it. I don’t know if that will work indefinitely.’

As an explanation, that was chillingly clear.

‘OK. Is there anything else new?’ John has to probe this wound, especially for one particular thing. ‘Are you having any thoughts of...’ At that point his throat closes and will not open back up. Not for the word _suicide_.

‘I’m not really clear on the point of life,’ says Sherlock, lying down to peer under the ottoman John is sitting on. ‘But I’m not actively planning to terminate it.’

The implication of passive fantasy does not escape John. ‘Sherlock, it will get better. _Soon_ ,’ he says – more sharply than he means to, but this is just so bloody vital. John wants to grab on to Sherlock, kiss him, order him like a sergeant major to just _get well_ , but he’s wary of the response. Sherlock might be angry... or not react at all.

‘Are you going to read the note Zoya’s left for us, or not?’ Sherlock says.

‘What?’ John blinks. Right then he spots the note: a piece of paper wedged into the handle of Sherlock’s suitcase. He grabs it ‘Hey, it’s a map. Of the city. Jesus – someone’s circled some side road and written "Kolyvanov" and the name of some bar.' John's not about to try to pronounce _Vyborgskiy_. 

Sherlock is up from the floor in an instant, and peering over John’s shoulder.

‘Interesting. We _do_ have a friend. Or is it a cunning trap, Captain Watson?’

Sherlock’s asking him? Well, it seemed to be a real question. ‘I don’t know, do I? It might be a trap but it’s not like we have any other leads. Your contact did say Zoya had mob connections and wanted out; maybe this is her way of helping us. So we arm ourselves and head to Vy-however-you-pronounce-it, I suppose.’ Because that worked out so well in Malta... oh God, John is not going to think of Zagami. Or his Maltese associate, who the news feeds named as Tabone. All over the media: Zagami’s sobbing wife and their baby daughter. Tabone’s little son.

In the army, you tried to know as little as possible about anyone who you shot. That rule came about for a reason. John focuses, and drags himself back by force. He loves Sherlock. He will kill, when necessary, to protect him.

Sherlock is sitting down on the other ottoman and steepling his fingers. ‘I concur with your proposal, but I suggest some extra steps. Firstly, I would like to ask our hostess where this information comes from. Secondly, even your skill with a firearm is unlikely to prevail unaided against an entire bar full of Russian bandits. Fortunately we have access to a kitchen.’

Sherlock pauses. John concentrates, not sure what he’s driving at yet, and Sherlock smiles. It’s not nice expression, but it animates his face, and John feels a sharp, welcome stab of anticipation. Yes. Sherlock is dangerous, even when half-broken. They both are. That is the point.

‘I haven’t made tear gas in years,’ Sherlock says. Then his expression goes blank, as if a light inside him has flickered out, and he carries on searching the room for hidden cameras.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John are lying low in St Petersburg while they prepare to take on Moriarty’s final sniper, Oleg Kolyvanov. But between language problems and Sherlock’s depression, progress is frustratingly slow, and on top of that their Russian host may not be what she seems…

**Sherlock**

In the north of Petrogradsky Island the snow is less trampled, and so less slippery. There is a suburban winter hush as they walk out of the unassuming backstreet premises of a gun shop, their new weapons hidden under the thick coats they bought on Nevsky Prospekt before coming out here. 

In spite of advance research, John was unfamiliar with many of the options, and it took him some time to select an AS-Val assault rifle and an Izhmash Saiga 12 gauge. Their handguns: 9mm PMM Makarov for Sherlock, Gyurza 9mm for John. Sherlock mentally recites the names, and the details of range and handling John earnestly related to him, and tries to pin them to the inside of his head.

The information is fading already. It will drip out of his head like melted snow. They now have weapons and John understands them, that is what counts. They hesitate on the pavement. John is apparently uncertain of the way back to the Metro... and so is Sherlock.

On the way here he felt the city, its flesh and fact and concrete, spreading around him, node by node, vast and intricate and penetrable by a disciplined and logical mind. He does not think that he has actually lost his ability in that respect. But his strength, and his belief in the validity of the required effort, appear to be gone. Information drifts, disperses. He cannot care. He cannot remember the way they came.

Humiliation. Blank.

John looks sideways at Sherlock, humphs, runs his tongue over his lips and fumbles a garish map in his gloved hands. They start walking through a light snowfall, past building frontages painted pale orange, then green, then yellow, presumably in the direction of the station.

‘Where now?’ John says. ‘Chemistry kit?’

‘Yes,’ says Sherlock. The fact of John prompting him is galvanising; or at any rate Sherlock decides that it has to be so. ‘Perhaps a shop that sells educational supplies?’

John googles on his phone. Somehow, half an hour later, they are outside a shop with a two-storey picture of a toddler above the entrance. Outsize advertisements are popular here. Inside, they do find the glassware, and Sherlock asks the shop assistant about where he might buy chemicals. Maybe she knows that, but she doesn’t know any English, and ‘ingredients for tear gas’ is not in the phrasebook.

They have a simple problem: how to obtain legal substances in a major city. And Sherlock is too tired to think it out. A workaround must exist, and even in the context of a foreign culture he should be capable of extracting it from the pattern of the world, but somehow he doesn’t even start to do it. It’s as if he willed his head to nod, but it won’t move.

Paralysis. Shame.

‘Um, maybe a garden centre?’ says John as they trudge through half-cleared slush towards Nevsky. He won’t look at Sherlock now, or is Sherlock imagining that? Well. If there are garden centres, John can’t find them using English search terms. So next they have a dozen crippled non-conversations, aided or possibly hindered by gesticulations involving an Erlenmeyer flask, with monolingual street hawkers on Nevsky. They are finally overheard by a passing student, who tells them in English about a string of kiosks which sell fertiliser to the owners of weekend cottages.

After blundering through descending fog to visit three of these cluttered little booths, they find everything they need. But it’s taken all day. They slog back to Zoya’s flat, inching through the dark courtyard to avoid slipping and smashing their purchases.

Sherlock is trembling with exhaustion. It’s as if the endless snow was gradually shrouding his mind. He does not feel himself here. But the city, the miles of pastel frontages pressed between white ground and huge grey sky, is absolutely itself. And it is Kolyvanov’s. The man hacked Sherlock’s network and invited them here as if they were guests. Time was when Sherlock would have relished that challenge. Maybe he still would, on his own turf. Not when he’s blinded by fog on alien streets and in his head.

He remembers how easily Graf died. How hard this new task feels. Apparently death is the easy part of proceedings.

Fortunately, on their return to the flat Zoya is still out, and Mama Yevdokimova is either shut in her room or absent as well. Sherlock rallies a little, as the warmth sinks into his body. They hang their coats up on the rack by the door and, to John’s delight and obvious surprise, Sherlock takes him by the shoulders and they share a long, if sedate kiss. A spark of nervous energy has rekindled in Sherlock, and he needs to utilise it.

The preparation of tear gas is a controlled sequence of actions, one which requires care if the flat is not to be rendered uninhabitable. Sherlock begins the first steps, and feels a little better. He is employing science, towards an end. Nobody except John, now standing back and squinting at his phrasebook, mouthing out syllables, would know that anything was wrong with him. Maybe now, maybe tomorrow or next week, the lithium will work. Sherlock will start wanting again. Until then, he will do things anyway.

Mid-evening, Zoya returns, arriving just as Sherlock is sealing the last of three small canisters of gas. She removes her outer gear then comes into the kitchen, sniffs the air and raises her eyebrows at them.

‘ _Iz-vin-it-yeh,_ ’ says John carefully – earlier he treated Sherlock to grumpy disbelief on the question of what kind of language puts four syllables in ‘sorry’– and smiles. ‘I don’t think we’ve left the kitchen in a mess.’

‘OK,’ Zoya says, looking slightly baffled. ‘Well, I want to buy a new kitchen with the money you pay. Would you like tea?’

‘Oh, I’m dying for a cup,’ says John. ‘We are British.’

Zoya smiles. It gives her a dimple. John clearly likes the dimple. She is still wary of him, but that will probably change. John’s heterosexual flirting techniques seem asinine, yet Sherlock knows from observation that they often work. Perhaps it would be strategic for John to get close to this woman, and yet... Sherlock cannot bear it.

He can hardly restrain a snarl as he moves up very close behind John and looks at Zoya over his shoulder. ‘You left us a note – why?’ Sherlock demands. Has John forgotten she did that? This woman has already shown herself to be rather more than an ignorant bystander to their business.

Zoya puts down the delicate teacups which she’s just extracted from a battered cupboard and gives Sherlock a cautious look.

‘I believe you have... business with the chief of Kolyvanov Security,’ she says. ‘He is very respectable. Nice offices on Ligovsky, armed guards. But he is still a bandit, and everything is violent. For example, I had a friend whose husband worked for him and now she is widow. Of course, I can’t help you at all. But if something goes wrong for him, many people would be pleased.’

‘Is that so?’ says Sherlock coldly. Unlike John, he is not in the market for damsels in distress. This one is as likely to be trying to get them killed as helping them out. But Sherlock can’t read her. Yes, the set of her muscles confirms her claimed job as a fitness coach, and the splash-pattern scars on one wrist matches the style of the frying pan hanging on the wall and the treacherous tilt of the cooker’s broken ring, but beyond that... she must be betraying a thousand deeper truths with her dress, her stance, her jewellery, but Sherlock is too culturally blind to interpret them. So blind that he didn’t even consider that the man they are looking for might be sufficiently above-board that he has a business address they could have found at Tourist Information. He is consumed by his own inadequacy, to the exclusion of... _STOP thinking about yourself. OBSERVE_. Enough schoolboy errors!

What is happening to him? When will it end?

John has stepped in to make things nice – of course he has. ‘I understand,’ he’s saying. ‘ _You_ didn’t tell us about Vy... V... uh, that bar. Another of Mr Jones’ contacts told us.’ He screws up his face in a conspiratorial grimace which seems to halve his IQ.

Zoya nods. ‘Yes, I think that’s right.’ She hesitates. ‘Maybe actually I’ll go to bed now.’ Abruptly she’s gone, leaving them with the teacups.

‘There’s something she’s not telling us,’ says Sherlock, as soon as she’s out of earshot.

John sighs. ‘Yes, that possibility hadn’t escaped me, thanks. Any idea what?’

Sherlock has to shake his head. ‘I don’t know enough about how things work here. I know she’s telling the truth about her job, she doesn’t have a boyfriend and she often cooks in this kitchen. That’s it.’

He expects his ignorance to be met with frustration, but John just shrugs. ‘OK. We just have to take her at face value and keep our eyes open, then. Anyway, my gut feeling is... well, I like her.’

‘On what grounds?’ Sherlock scans the room, his standard gesture when keeping his database of detail up to date, then realises that nothing he saw actually settled in his head. This whole flat is like that, a book he is too tired to read. Oh God, and he actually _can’t read_. The realisation stabs him again. He feels himself physically wincing, and glances sideways at John, fearing a reaction.

John is looking out of the window at the snowy courtyard. He shrugs and turns back to Sherlock.

‘Look, sometimes I just meet someone and we get on. There’s a fifty per cent chance you’d be dead of Jeff Hope’s pills if I didn’t.’

Low blow. ‘Meeting her is like meeting me, is it?’

‘Oh for goodness’ – what _is_ the matter with you?’ John sounds exasperated; then there’s the excruciating moment as he visibly realises that was tactless. ‘Well – all right. Sod it. We might only have to spend another day here. Tomorrow evening I guess we head to that bar and try to draw Kolyvanov off somewhere so I can shoot him. We have the tear gas as back-up. Unless you have a better plan?’

‘No.’ Admitting that is gall and wormwood.

‘Me neither,’ says John. ‘OK, shall we go to bed? It’s not been my favourite day ever.’

Sherlock heads first to the bathroom, which is only marginally nicer than the kitchen. There’s plenty of limescale and he starts routinely assessing the age of the encrustations before he realises he has no idea how hard the water is here, so calculations will be pointless.

Sherlock reflects that if his genius fades, then John, the conductor of light, will have no use for him. The thought manifests less in his brain than in his stomach. There is a leaden fatality to it. Of course he will lose John. To normality, to vanilla women. All that Sherlock is, however rare, however brilliant, is simply unnecessary to an ordinary life. His fingers curl tight around the edge of the sink. The face in the mirror is thinner than it’s ever been since he stopped using. For months, he has been burning soul and body as fuel for his mind. That is all they should be. Perhaps he would look after himself, for John, like John says he should... but John will leave anyway. Sherlock is sure, in that place beneath his mind, that John will leave.

He presses out his lithium tablets and swallows them down.

Sherlock goes into the bedroom and locks the door. John is sitting on one of the sofabeds, engrossed in the phrasebook, his lips painstakingly shaping syllables. Something stirs inside Sherlock, a physically painful slippage inside his chest.

‘John,’ he says.

The pain in his own voice – even he can hear it – makes John look up. And because he is John Watson, there are no stupid questions, just an expression so open and ready that Sherlock is warmed a little merely by seeing it. Sherlock leans back against the door. John comes over and puts his arms around his waist. They kiss, and Sherlock relaxes into it just a little.

‘Well, this isn’t easy, is it?’ says John.

‘No,’ agrees Sherlock.

They might be talking about St Petersburg, or Kolyvanov, or the thing between them, or the state of Sherlock’s mind. John, being shorter, leans his head on Sherlock’s shoulder, but Sherlock feels more embraced than embracing. John’s body heat, steady and calm, seems to ignite a spark in the numb core of Sherlock. He wants John’s presence; more of it, and more intense.

‘Hurt me,’ Sherlock says. He hasn’t felt that impulse since he got over the vomiting virus, but he does now. They could easily die tomorrow, and he will not go without... this. ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated but – I want.’

John looks wary, but only for a moment. ‘Is that how I can get through to you?’ he asks.

Internally, Sherlock winces. It doesn’t show; nothing shows. ‘Yes. Maybe. A little,’ he says. What he really wants, if he can’t have cocaine, is to somehow wrap himself up inside John, as if John could function for him while this sickness takes its course. But failing that, he’ll take any feeling, any gift John wants to give.

‘This’ll be fun to explain to the landlady over breakfast,’ says John, with a half-smile that momentarily irritates Sherlock before the feeling sinks and disappears, like they all do. ‘All right. Nothing complex, and “stop” means “stop”. OK?’

‘Yes,’ says Sherlock.

John reaches up to Sherlock’s hair, and grabs, and pulls.

‘Down,’ he orders. With his other hand he gathers Sherlock’s wrists together and grips them tightly.

His scalp on fire, Sherlock is forced, unresisting, to his knees beside one of the beds. John sits on the edge of it, and brings his mouth down on Sherlock’s, hard. Sherlock closes his eyes. One of John’s hands deals pain, the other restraint, and in between is the kiss. These are messages in a language that Sherlock no longer speaks but, yes, he can still understand.

The kiss deepens. Sherlock is moaning into their joined mouths, a ridiculous sound so early in a scene but his body is waking up and he can’t, doesn’t want, to help it. The release is too urgent.

John freezes. He stops and draws back, letting go.

‘Damn,’ he mouths, and jerks a thumb towards the door. ‘Zoya.’

‘So?’ snaps Sherlock. He’d taken it for granted that she’d spy on them – why is John surprised, let alone bothered? Sherlock doesn’t care if the Russians think John’s murdering him, as long as they stay out of the room.

John looks pissed off. So pissed off that Sherlock’s stomach drops.

‘Fuck, you really do not have the _first_ idea of –’ John doesn’t finish. He looks down.

Good grief. Sherlock stands up, takes two quick strides and pulls open the door. Zoya is out there, in her housecoat, looking concerned.

‘I heard moans,’ she says. ‘Is your friend hurt? Do you need something?’

Sherlock glares at her. She’s genuine, he’s pretty sure. Whatever her story, whatever mess has landed her with Sherlock in her flat, she actually thinks someone’s in pain so she should help them. And he hates her for it. She reminds him of Molly, and he hurt and hurt Molly, then left her behind. Those thoughts catch up with him now. He can’t do anything for Molly. Only burn it all.

‘We were attempting to have sex,’ enunciates Sherlock. ‘If you would like to continue eavesdropping, the next item on the bill will be John chaining me up and beating me until I bleed, or possibly fucking me in the arse while strangling me. I defer to him in matters of pleasure.’

Zoya gapes at him. Sherlock wants her to be repelled, and she clearly is, but it doesn’t feel satisfying. He feels soiled. John is fidgeting behind him.

‘I’m glad nobody needs help,’ Zoya says flatly. ‘Goodnight.’

She pulls the door closed on them. A second later, John is right up in Sherlock’s face.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing? Are you eleven years old?’

‘Are you ashamed of me?’ Sherlock half-shouts. It wasn’t what he meant to say, and it came out loud. All the things he can’t be, even for John – a woman, normal and _oh God_ fully sane – are banging in his throat. So much that he never wanted to be, and can’t be... and yet the self that he has is leeching out, breaking down. Does John not understand that he is begging?

Apparently John does, a little. He rubs a hand over his lined face, and the anger fades slightly.

‘Only when you bully people,’ John says. ‘Jesus. I’ll talk to Zoya in the morning. Maybe we can make her think you were joking.’ Pause. ‘If you’re so proud of how weird you are, you might try accepting a few key facts about me too. I’m not gay, I’m bisexual, and yes I will smile at pretty girls. That is not too much for you to cope with.’

Bitterness roils in Sherlock’s throat. ‘Of course,’ is all he says. _How weird you are_ clangs in his head, and the rest of John’s speech dangles from it as so much redundant confirmation. Things are wrong in his mind, and the means of communication is severed. Things are wrong.

He takes off his clothes and lies stiffly in one of the sofabeds. John turns off the light, then blunders his way to the other. Sherlock lies there, face to the wall, willing the sleep that is unlikely to visit him for hours yet, though it will also stay for longer than it used to. Minutes pass.

A thump, creaking and rustling. The bedclothes move, and Sherlock is nudged into the wall as John presses up behind him on the narrow sofabed.

‘Hey,’ John says. ‘I liked that you made a racket when I kissed you. You sounded... involved.’

Sherlock is still. Something surges inside him, not like the awakening of before, but still real and startling. There’s no outlet for it, though. John put an arm up and over him. A few minutes later, John is asleep, without any sign of intrusive dreams.

Sherlock waits for sleep. He’s a truth-seeker, and the truth is that he is losing himself in darkness. Fire in the sky, the illusion of mastery, the language of torturing loving hands: these fade, and their meaning drains. Now, faintly, there is John’s breath on his neck. John remains, a word invoked moment by moment, above the abyss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to chemists for the fact that my depiction of the process of making tear gas isn’t quite up to snuff. I was actually offered some expert advice on the subject – after the story was done. I do try to be accurate where I can but I decided that rather than do huge reworking I’d leave things as they are since it’s not like I watch BBC Sherlock for its strict fidelity to science in the first place.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John are planning their hit on the last of Moriarty’s snipers. Except that it is becoming increasingly unclear whether Sherlock wants to kill Kolyvanov or himself.

**John**

8am, and Sherlock is sleeping. He does more of that lately, which is probably good, so John gets up carefully in the curtained twilight, dresses and pads out of the room. The kitchen is empty so he makes tea and sits there with the laptop.

He meant to try to do some more research into the way local bandits operate. He also meant to look up which antidepressants are most commonly prescribed with lithium these days because, family history notwithstanding, it may be that Sherlock needs one to jolt him out of the slump. What he absolutely did not mean to do is look at online tributes to Zagami and Tabone. This particular page says Zagami had converted to Catholicism and was trying to make a fresh start.

John knew nothing about the Taliban he killed, and Jeff Hope was called a psycho even by his kids. But these two men... John snicks shut the laptop and presses his face into his hands. He destroyed two families. It was necessary. It was just. There was a gun to Sherlock’s head. John would pay any price to save Sherlock.

For that to work, Sherlock needs to fight as well.

Footsteps are approaching the kitchen. John rubs his face then reshapes it into a bright smile. Zoya enters, in her housecoat – and the details of last night flash through John’s brain. Not that he had really forgotten them, but there’s a lot of competition for space in his head these days.

‘Morning. Do you want some tea?’ John asks. He realises he has no idea if he’s just been polite or offered mortal offence, considering this is Zoya’s flat.

She just stops on the other side of the room and regards him uncertainly.

‘I will make breakfast now,’ she says. ‘Breakfast is in the price for homestay tourist rooms.’

‘Very kind of you. But you don’t have to,’ says John. ‘We’re not tourists.’

‘If you were, I would have a normal life!’ responds Zoya. ‘I thought you were normal people and maybe I will help you, but now you don’t make sense. What am I supposed to do?’

John listens submissively and lets Zoya be as she starts pulling cupboards open. This rant is as much about her as about them.

‘So, you are homosexual?’ she asks brusquely. ‘You cane each other for carnal stimulation? I heard that is British habit but I thought it was a joke.’

John nearly swallows his tea wrong. It’s Zoya’s careful pronunciation that did it – she must first have googled some stereotype or other, then looked up some of the English words. And now part of his brain is loudly going, _Here it is, then: you’ve been outed_. He’d expected to feel defiant, or at least pragmatic about that. Not sorry for upsetting someone.

John’s one previous gay relationship was conducted totally on the London leather scene, and he crashed out of the scene and the relationship together. None of that gave him much experience with Explaining Things. Though he does remember being 14 and asking Harry how you could possibly have sex without a dick being involved. Maybe what goes around comes around.

‘Um,’ he says, scratching the back of his head. ‘Sherlock’s homosexual. I’m bisexual. And yes, some people are open about that sort of thing in London. I beat him, not the other way round. It’s for pleasure. Um, it’s not just caning.’ No caning at all, in fact, yet; it’s on their deferred to-do list. ‘We love each other.’

Now he sounds like he’s talking down to a kid. But it would be no good using terminology Zoya might not know. She’s getting milk and eggs out of the fridge, now, and managing to do it while looking over her shoulder as if monitoring him for spontaneous mutations.

‘You said your friend was insane,’ she says. She sets the eggs and milk on the table, keeps her hands on them, and seems to wait.

Crap. John does not want to go there, for all that he started it, in the hall last night. But lying would be worse. ‘He’s not well at the moment,’ John says. ‘It’s mostly depression. He’ll be fine.’

Zoya makes a noise like a growl in the back of her throat. But then she nods as if pulling herself together, and starts what looks like the process of making an omelette.

‘You kill people,’ she says. ‘I never met gays before, but I know many bandits here are insane. Kolyvanov fought in Afghanistan. Very difficult to have a normal life after that. He came back with other _Afgantsy_ , the veterans, and started protection business. For ten years they shoot people, then business becomes so big Kolyvanov is respectable and must pretend. But still he is...’ Zoya waves a hand beside her mixing jug, as if searching for a word.

‘Ruthless,’ John supplies. He’s disquieted by how vividly he not so much sees what Zoya is saying as feels it inside him. He knows, if only in outline, that the Soviet Afghan war was bloody and pointless in a way that outdoes his own experiences. Kolyvanov came out of that?

‘Yes,’ says Zoya, satisfied with his word. Without him actually saying anything she seems to have softened towards John, yet become more remote at the same time. He tries to get a read on that, and then he realises: to her his bisexuality, his alleged violence and his alarming friend are all of a piece, all suspicious but to be tolerated in the specific context of why he is here, which is to kill. His and Sherlock’s sexual deviance is a sign that they are vicious enough to take on a bandit chief.

That’s useful of course. And it hurts. The judgement reminds him that, whatever Zoya means by a ‘normal’ life, he’ll never have one. Well, that was the choice he made, partnering with Sherlock.

‘Zoya,’ he says in a low voice, standing up and going over to her at the sideboard. He’s very aware of his arms by his sides, and of not knowing what to do with them, as if there was some other option than to leave them hanging.

Zoya is whisking eggs vigorously. She doesn’t turn around, and doesn’t acknowledge his presence, but he feels she’s tensing up. He doesn’t know if he’s communicating something or just spooking her, but he needs her to know that he’s not an enemy. She’s on her own, doing her best to get by and care for the unseen Mama, whose closed door smells vaguely of illness. John respects that.

‘Carefully, I’ll splash you,’ Zoya says, so that John has to step back. Then, when he’s at a distance, she adds: ‘I am rude and strange, you are thinking. Well. I know not many foreigners closely. I was never in England, though I wish to go.'

John is touched. 'Mr Jones' - Sherlock's cover name - 'is far ruder and stranger,' he replies. 'In his defence, he's pretty stressed at the moment. But we're in your home and should respect your rules.'

Zoya shakes her head slightly. 'You know, I meet worse people every day,' she says. From her tone it's clear she appreciated what John said. ‘We live in bandit capitalism, you see, and if many people in Piter manage to live normally anyway, I don’t. Everything is mess. My husband took my money. I learned English to get a good job at an hotel, and sometimes I think if I was ordinary English instead of ordinary Russian then how different everything would be. Then you visit me, and I so want you to be what I think is ordinary English that I get upset when you are actually strange. And I think what a fool I am, because I am strange too.'

Zoya is still preparing food with her back to him, but her tone has softened. What she says makes sense. It reminds him a little of his disappointment when his first liberated Afghan villagers turned out to be a bunch of shifty wide-boys.

And Sherlock is right: Zoya clearly has secrets of her own. But John does not have it in him to be cold to her.

‘People are strange,’ he says.

To his delight, Zoya quietly sings, ‘ _When you’re a stranger..._ ’ – The Doors.

John hears Sherlock’s tread coming down the corridor. He enters wearing just a shirt and underpants – rude – and peers at the now-hissing frying pan.

‘Ah, a foodstuff. How very hospitable. Does it contain any mercury?’ he says.

Christ. Sherlock’s rampant arrogance is the last thing they need.

Zoya has turned to interpolate herself between Sherlock and the pan as if she thinks he might be dangerous around hot metal. Sherlock smirks unpleasantly in her direction.

‘It’s an omelette, and you’ll eat it,’ snaps John, at the same time as pointing an emphatic _sit here_ at the chair opposite him. ‘That is, assuming Zoya is kind enough to make some for both of us.’

John expects Sherlock to utter some offensive quip in response. Instead, his face freezes into a neutral expression and he drops into the indicated chair. It’s like the moment when he first mentioned tear gas; he seems to have exhausted his resources and switched off.

Zoya has retreated to her cooking, which is probably wise of her. John yanks open his laptop and clicks on the sptimes.ru tab.

‘I found some info about how the mafia power structures work here,’ he says, under cover of Zoya clattering. ‘Take a look.’

He half-expects Sherlock to mutter something about not being able to read, but he doesn’t, whether because it isn’t wholly true or because speech is too much effort, John can’t tell. Sherlock’s eyes track the screen, though, and he clicks the pad as if surfing. Minutes pass. John asks Zoya about the how the city’s trolleybuses work, and she replies politely enough, though whatever warmth she was previously showing towards John is not being extended to Sherlock. She serves the two of them half each of the first omelette.

Sherlock eats his slowly and fastidiously. John finds he has to force himself not to chew in time with Sherlock, as if matching him in that would help. Neither of them have finished by the time Zoya decants the second omelette onto two plates and disappears out of the room with them, presumably heading for Mama.

John watches her go. ‘I thought she might eat with us,’ he says. ‘I actually got her to talk a bit before you did your arsehole routine. I don’t think she’s really prejudiced, she just doesn’t know what the flaming hell to make of us. I’m not sure I do, sometimes.’

John keeps his tone light, hoping it might draw a human response from Sherlock. Instead, he turns his head slightly, as if the movement is an effort, and replies as if formally, ‘Do you know anything about the Soviet mindset, John? Stalin left Hitler standing in the mass murder stakes. In a big city like this, for example, getting your neighbours sent to the gulag was the accepted way of enlarging your living space. And while Putin may not be so overtly brutal, the governmental structure grows ever more Soviet and the society it administrates is of necessity the same. My brother is quite the admirer, as you would expect.’

John shifts in his seat. Yes he was vaguely aware of some of that, but he doesn’t see the relevance. ‘I’m trying to get along with the landlady, not blame her for the Cold War,’ he retorts. ‘I just persuaded her not to chuck us out for being perverts – not that I’m mad enough to think you’d thank me for that.’ 

Sherlock turns his head so far that John can’t see his face.

‘I suggest you top her, then,’ he says. ‘I’m sure she’d be eager to learn.’

 _Oh for fuck’s sake._ This is not what he needs from Sherlock. 

It is human, though. Jealous, insecure, vulnerable.

‘Sherlock, if that’s all this is... Look, I do not play away from home,’ John says. ‘I might have had quite a few girlfriends in the past, but if you want me, I’m sticking with you. Understand?’

John stares intently into Sherlock’s eyes. He’s rewarded by seeing, in their depths, a glimmer of relief.

‘Indeed,’ Sherlock says, as if it’s a cutting observation. ‘So why foster any connection with a local when this time tomorrow we’ll either be dead or gone?’

John sighs. ‘Because I happen to like her, and also because I can’t bear not to, Sherlock. I can’t live on deductions like you can.’ Except Sherlock can’t either. Sherlock called him from Vegas. They both know that.

It’s not the time to go there. ‘Is there a plan for today?’ says John. ‘There’s no point trying that bar place until the evening.’

Sherlock puts down his knife and fork. ‘So we use our time to case the area. Obvious.’

John nods. It is obvious. It’s the sparsest of plans, and he could have come up with it himself. But at least it’s some kind of purpose. They are still together. Sherlock can still function. For the present.

 

**Sherlock**

Sherlock is unsure how long his ability to function will last. It comes and goes. Currently it goes.

‘I might come to like this town, if it was a bit bloody warmer,’ says John, a few minutes after they venture out. It’s a bright winter’s day, and they’re walking more confidently than yesterday, on deep, fresh snow. They turn a corner into a road with a frozen canal running down its centre, railing-lined. Classical buildings with crumbling pastel stucco march along the banks. A bridge spans the frozen water in a gentle, dynamic curve just ahead of them, dotted with people.

The scene is mathematics and beauty, life and form, and it presses against Sherlock’s eyeballs like a blade. There is a growing metallic tinge to reality, a suffusing aggression that sickens him almost to the point of recoil – and yet there is nothing out of the ordinary here. Just streets and people, and John, stamping and huffing in the snowboots that Sherlock knows look ridiculous on him, although it is necessary to deduce their comicality by application to memory rather than any spontaneous reaction.

‘This place’d be no good for you to set up shop in, obviously, with snow covering all the deduceable stuff,’ John says.

Sherlock nods. Apparently John is talking for him now.

When they reach Vyborgskiy, Sherlock commits the environs to memory. He can cope with that much. It’s just an underground dive bar, with one unassuming sign attached to the pharmacy that occupies the street level premises above. Steps lead down to a shuttered door. Sherlock risks twenty seconds’ study of the place, forcing himself to suck up a little basic information from the dirt in the entranceway – mostly male clientele, trouble with the landlord, bathrooms at the back – before they go on to walk the surrounding streets and learn the lie of the land.

They wind through coated, booted crowds. An ocean of human detail the equal of London’s is sluicing around them, leaving the barest damp trace on Sherlock’s mind. They find escape routes for use after they kill Kolyvanov, and Sherlock fixes them in his head by will. He does still have a little will, when it’s needed.

‘John,’ he says when they get out of the immediate range of Vyborgskiy, then stops in the street, confused at himself. He did and did not mean to speak. What is happening?

John finishes a step, then his head swivels round, framed against the graffitied side of a confectionary kiosk, his face creased with anxious concern. What the hell must Sherlock’s voice sound like, to get that reaction? And John’s face... it is like staring at the sun, Sherlock cannot do it, he is disconnected; his head jerks up, and above him is the vast northern sky, pregnant with snow. His thoughts corrupt like the blackening slush underfoot, but up there, surely, pain itself would freeze, and shatter, and dissipate in the wind.

John is touching Sherlock’s chin with a gloved hand. Bodies bustle around them.

‘Sherlock, stay with me,’ says John, his voice hitching. ‘We’re going to get through this.’

John’s hand is warm even through the glove, and warmth is not alien to Sherlock. In his bones, he retains the memory of fire: Vegas heat and the ecstasy of what he did not know to be madness. What he has lost is the memory of the between world, the ordinary people place. Where John chooses to live, with his sureties and clichés. Sherlock cannot go there.

Sherlock looks at John directly again, and he can feel the wrongness of his own gaze. It’s as if he had been turned into a puppet, and was looking out of a wooden face.

‘We’re going to have lunch,’ John says, or rather states. He guides Sherlock firmly into a café and orders borscht by pointing at a laminated picture on the wall, then at the two of them. When it comes it is as red as blood, and with John staring at him Sherlock regards it and raises his spoon and is arrested by the compelling though clearly groundless conceit that the liquid is collecting there as it streams from a jagged vertical gash in his forearm. An inane supposition, as suicide by wrist laceration is seldom successful and in any case produces excruciating hand cramps that would render it impossible to hold a spoon.

John is watching him from the other side of the little table. Sherlock looks back as if from far away. He is slipping from the standards John sets for him, he knows, and the capacity to care about that seems to be another thing lost. He remembers, as if in a foreign language, _I love John_. He eats, in honour of that preserved fact, though the soup tastes of nothing.

‘You’re getting worse and I can’t help!’ John bursts out in an undertone. Then he bites his lip and swivels his head as if changing, or at least softening, the subject. ‘You got off cocaine, so logically you can get through this. I mean, basically you’re in withdrawal. You were flooded with dopamine and now you’re short on it. But not forever.’

 _No indeed_ , thinks Sherlock calmly, _Kolyvanov will kill us first_. And then his mind’s eye throws up another vision: John shot in the heart, head, stomach, John’s gore spraying out, hot and dark and intimate. Death in John’s eyes.

Sherlock pitches forward in his seat. For a moment the ice has shifted. It hurts. There is fear, grief, shame at what is happening to him and what might happen to John. He grabs John’s wrist.

‘John, I am trying to hold on to you. I don’t know what’s happening. I am trying. Please understand.’

John drops his spoon and looks behind them. Apparently satisfied that they’ve chosen a secluded table and nobody is watching, he gently detaches Sherlock’s grip, and shifts so that they are holding hands. He squeezes, and the mixture of love and pleasure and dread in his eyes is awful, in every sense. Sherlock has brought him to this; made him grateful for the tiniest human touch.

‘Hey, I’m here,’ John says. ‘Hold on as tight as you like.’

Sherlock does.

 

**John**

John is aware that however he feels, however much he wants to just stop the world now and bloody _save_ Sherlock, like some shining white knight instead of a knackered ex-soldier the wrong side of forty, he can’t. Instead he has to usher Sherlock out of the café and just make sure he doesn’t actually stop moving as they head for the M1 – not the motorway but a Metro line – on the way to a rendezvous with a contact of a contact who claims to know something useful.

John is not sure how much Sherlock is taking in of even his basic surroundings, as they push through an icy marketplace, the guttural rattle of a Russian-language announcement streaming over them from a nearby loudspeaker. Thank fuck it doesn’t actually matter. Whatever secrets a functional Sherlock might be able to unlock here, they are irrelevant. Tomorrow they will be out of here.

Or so John has to believe. Sherlock seems simply indifferent, walking and stopping at the appropriate times, in silence. Once John called him a machine. But he is human enough to be mad, to be damaged, to beg for comfort. John is the one who lacks what is needed to help.

In a cellar internet café off a courtyard, they meet a youth with pustules, a scraggy beard and bad English which he uses to make semi-comprehensible jokes. To John’s relief, Sherlock rises to a kind of robotic animation, which he uses to establish that the boy does indeed have something worthwhile, a list of names and mobile numbers for the staff of Kolyvanov Securities, in Cyrillic and English.

But then Sherlock starts to pick individual clumsy threads out of the boy’s conversation and use them to demonstrate his stupidity. It seems as if, now Sherlock’s brain is roused, the poison is rising to the surface and overflowing down familiar channels.

Offended, the contact almost flounces off without actually handing over the list. John hastily intervenes, uttering inanities and compliments on his broken English, and secures the data, all the while watching from the corner of his eye as Sherlock visibly sags and his eyes resume their frightening blankness.

‘John,’ says Sherlock, almost conversationally as they leave the cellar. ‘Would you kill me if I asked you to?’

John stops mid-step. Then he forces himself to go on, walking, acting normal, because of course Sherlock would voice a question like that, out of the desire to gather all possible data. He would never ask John for real. Not when he has a gun and chemicals of his own.

‘No,’ John says. ‘There’s not many things I wouldn’t do for you, but you just found one.’

‘Even if there was absolutely no hope for my mind?’ Sherlock picks his way over some blocks of near-ice on the curb. ‘But then you always believe there is hope.’

‘ _Yes!_ ’ It’s a contained explosion, enough only to cause the nearest passerby to glance round at them. ‘You’re depressed, not –’ John tails off, not knowing what he wanted to say. Words seem irrelevant; he feels like he needs a psychic knife to slice away the unreality steadily thickening around the man beside him. ‘It’s temporary. You know that yourself.’

Sherlock has adopted a distant, calculating expression, for all the world as if he was considering a case.

‘My intellect can substitute for some of the lower functions, but not indefinitely,’ he says. ‘Further experimental observations of my decline are required before considering any irrevocable action. However...’ Sherlock’s voice breaks. ‘I can’t live like this. I disgust myself. John. You said it would get better.’

Fuck. They are at a busy crossroads now. An elbow jostles into Sherlock’s back as he stands blocking the entrance to a crossing. He peers around as if bewildered.

John takes his arm, wishing and wishing he had more to offer than promises and the utter determination to make them come true.

‘It _will_. Sherlock. Right now, we’re going back to Zoya’s. Just hang on for half an hour and we’ll be there. OK?’

Sherlock doesn’t respond. He appears to be listening to something inside his head. John doesn’t know whether to be fearful or relieved that he can’t hear it himself, and settles instead for just guiding Sherlock to the Metro station.

From there, they make it to Zoya’s without incident. John is revving up to do something supportive – hopefully the question of what will be resolved when he does it – but once they get through the flat door, Sherlock goes on ahead of him.

‘Just let me lie down on my own,’ he says in a voice that brooks no argument, so John has to respect that, and is standing in the corridor wondering what the hell to do when the door opens again, and in comes Zoya, returning from work. They exchange some pleasantries and Zoya says she needs to check on Mama.

Ah. John is interested at once. His concerns about Sherlock seem to fuzz out of focus, and he has only a moment to realise that he’s shutting down because of overload and conclude that this is not really good news before he’s offering to see if he can help, and Zoya is saying _spasiba_.

‘I know that one!’ crows John. She taught it to him yesterday. ‘Just don’t ask me to say it myself.’

Zoya laughs, and leads him into the mysterious third bedroom. Lying in a rickety-looking bed surrounded by shelves of china and knick-knacks is a glowering, bedridden old woman. Mentally John makes a shift – he’s in GP visiting mode now – and gets to work, carefully prodding Mama’s withered muscles.

Mama keeps up a consistent grumble as he examines her. For all John knows, she might be showering him with praise, but it sounds more like she resents his presence in her flat, which would be hardly surprising. Zoya doesn’t translate, instead telling him matter-of-factly that ‘Papa’ was killed doing military service before she was even born. Uncles helped support Zoya through childhood, but now she fends for herself and Mama, who gets some free meds but does better on expensive experimental ones that aren’t available via the state. Mama is very pleased to be treated by ‘a real English doctor’, Zoya says.

John is not above scanning the pill shelf for anything that might help Sherlock, but valium and muscle relaxants are not going to ease depression. He has more luck with helping Mama Yevdokimova, because through Zoya he can pass on details of some recently-developed clot-preventing exercises that she hasn’t heard of. The old lady finally favours him with an ambivalent smile – and then turfs him out of her den, apparently because what looks like a cheesy soap opera has come on the ancient TV that is burbling away in one corner.

As John emerges, he can see straight through the half-open door of his and Sherlock’s room, and what he sees are Sherlock’s legs, sprawled on one of the ottomans. John’s heart clenches with guilt. He should not have taken the instruction to go away seriously. He should have... well, who knows what he should have done but there must be something. He must be _able_ to do something. He enters the room, shuts the door and lies beside Sherlock, his lips close to the back of Sherlock’s neck.

‘Hello, John,’ Sherlock says, in a faintly ironic tone of voice. He’s lying awkwardly, as if he’d fallen there, and... oh God that is a line of thought John simply cannot follow. He casts about for something, anything positive.

‘Do you need me to hurt you?’ John manages. He dislikes saying it, because that addition to their lives was supposed to be about shared pleasure, not triage. But right now he’ll do anything.

Sherlock shakes his head, his ginger almost-curls rustling against the covers. John strokes them gently.

‘Let me reassure you that I can pick my times for this,’ Sherlock says. ‘I have reserves. I will use them tonight, I promise.’ Pause. ‘I’m still me, John.’

John closes his eyes. The strained but determined tone in Sherlock’s voice is faintly reassuring. If he can only hold on they’ll soon have their London life back, with interest: handcuffs, kisses, warmth and, crucially, all the pharmacological resources of Bart’s.

‘Please don’t kill yourself,’ says John. Those are the words he’s been trying to force out all day. ‘There’s too many other buggers trying to do that...’

John stops and regroups. He doesn’t want to go down the glib route. This is too important.

‘What I mean is, anything you need from me, any thing, you have it. If you don’t believe you can get through this, then let me believe it for you.’ Pause. ‘I didn’t think I could go on living when I was stuck in that bloody bedsit. I wasn’t actually planning suicide but I was starting to think about it. You’re why I stopped.’

There. He’s said all he can. When Sherlock replies with an exhalation that sounds like an affronted sigh, for a moment John is mortified, until he realises – it means Sherlock was holding his breath all through John’s speech. There is another silence, and then an awkward, wet sound.

Sherlock is crying.

‘Noted,’ he says. ‘Also... understood.’

For a few moments he snuggles back against John, warm and squirmy and alive. John wraps an arm around him, and feels Sherlock flex... and then abruptly go still, as if his energy had run out. John strokes his chest, feeling too-prominent ribs.

They _are_ going to get through this. John has seen highly intelligent patients in this condition before: severely depressed but retaining the ability to turn themselves back on by force of will at crucial moments.

Sherlock would never give in to an illness. Not with John to support him. Not when they could be on a plane tomorrow, on their way back to Baker Street.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock have a plan to take out Kolyvanov. It does not go particularly well.

**John**

A few hours later, they are on Unpronounceable Street, which has become John’s default name for most places in St Petersburg.

It’s arse-freezing bloody cold (surprise), even though John is wearing so many clothes that he feels practically spherical. This is not how he usually approaches a mission. Still, at least you don’t get sand in your pants around here. And the layers hide firearms well, enabling John to bring his rifle as well as the Gyurza he intends to use. He’d gone with his second best choice when it came to the rifle and he was grateful for that now. The Val has a collapsible skeleton stock that folds away so neatly that even a short-arse like himself could conceal it under a coat.

Sherlock is beside him, miraculously normal as promised. And by normal, John means that he’s doing an amazingly good job of pretending to be someone unrecognisably different. Both of them are heavily caked with the contents of Zoya’s make-up box, which John worried would merely make them appear ridiculous, until Sherlock got to work. John watched the whole thing, but he’s still not sure how Sherlock managed to change the planes of his own face, and perform some alchemy that made John’s nose look wider and his cheeks fuller. With additional padding inside his cheeks John surely ought to look like a joke chipmunk, but that’s not what the mirror showed. Sherlock is even managing to seem considerably shorter than his actual height, while still being swaggering and imperious. His public schoolboy air is gone, though. He’s implying with his every movement that he’s as common as a Peckham drug dealer, and as streetwise. That might, of course, be totally the wrong approach here. They have no way to know.

They stroll up – down, rather, given that it’s a basement – to Vyborgskiy. John’s initial fear, that there will be some kind of bouncer who casually bars them, or worse still searches them, proves groundless. They just push through the door into a crowded room which looks fairly Western apart from some embroidered screens along a wall. There’s table footie, flat screen tellies showing dancers in spandex, and what appear to be fairy lights hanging from the low ceiling.

What tells him he’s definitely not in England is the five guys huddling round a bar table on which are lying the half disassembled parts of an unfamiliar combat shotgun. Nobody else seems bothered. Mobsters, or ‘bandits’ as the Russians seem to say; former Spetsnaz most likely. 

‘ _Ya ishu Kolyvanova,_ ’ says Sherlock to a passing waitress. They spent some time at the flat getting a few words of Russian into their heads – John simply ignoring the amount of effort this cost Sherlock, because their other options have run out – and this is the result. Now John just has to hope it’s colloquially correct to use the verb ‘to seek’ like that, and they haven’t delivered a deadly insult or something.

It seems to work. The waitress stiffens then fires off a stream of obviously nervous Russian. Sherlock responds with a mask of imperious uninterest. John can detect his incomprehension, but to anyone else it would look like the waitress’ words were simply beneath his notice.

The gamble pays off. The woman looks offended, then irresolute, then simply points at a door in the far wall. Sherlock sets off towards it, glancing back at John. John nods. Time for action.

The plan, in as far as they have one, is to pose as London mobsters who want a local partner for routing Afghan and Kyrgyz opiates through Petersburg. Sherlock’s the businessman, John’s his hired muscle... and if they can get Kolyvanov in a private room with only a couple of hangers-on, Sherlock will drop the tear gas and John will shoot. If Kolyvanov figures out who they are before that, then they will have to do the gas-and-bullet routine in the middle of the bar.

Right. John stops speculating like a fool and narrows his focus to the matter in hand.

When they open the door, the white-walled room beyond is slightly quieter, but even smokier than the main bar. Black leather sofas take up most of the space – and yes, sitting on one of them is Kolyvanov. He’s smaller than the men around him, and there’s a whetted sharpness to both his face and his movements as he gestures with a mobile phone. He has palpable charisma, but that’s of no concern to John. He slides a hand into his jacket to grip his handgun. Beside him, Sherlock is looking around disdainfully, in-character, about to speak.

John’s arm won’t move.

It’s actually stuck inside his lapel because of a pressure to the right. One of the chatting drinkers has simply moved closer, and so has another, and they are holding John on both sides. He tries to escape, feeling like a dog being hoisted off the street by a catcher, but he can barely squirm as he’s marched towards Kolyvanov, who looks up at him as a way clears. To John’s left, the same thing is happening to Sherlock, and John’s hands have been pulled clear of his clothes by their wrists as if he was on puppet strings, and he thinks _I love you_ because coming next is very probably a bullet to the head. They have the attention of the entire room now. Women in too much make-up are laughing. They can all fuck off. This is bloody stupid grandstanding and John is not impressed.

Nor however is he dead, yet.

Sherlock, caught between another pair of thugs in suits, has been dragged up to Kolyvanov, who is looking mildly pleased as one of his minions reports to him in Russian, jutting a thumb at John. Kolyvanov’s blue eyes are piercing under his mousy hair. He remains sitting down as he assesses them: he’s a small man so he doesn’t bother trying to strut or loom.

‘Yes, I know who you are,’ he says, squinting carefully at their faces. ‘Very good make-up, Mr Holmes, but your friend can’t act. If you come here and look like you will shoot, my men spot you very quick. So, are you interested in the job?’

The banality of the words wrongfoots Sherlock, but probably only enough for John to notice. 

‘Are you trying to impress me?’ Sherlock says. ‘You think I need your little puzzles?’

‘I think you are impressed in the important way,’ says Kolyvanov, gesturing around him. Several weapons are visibly pointed at John and Sherlock. ‘And I think business in this city has enough puzzles even for you, yes. I could kill you very easily, and I would have killed Dr Watson to pay a personal debt to James Moriarty, but I don’t like waste. You come with me now.’

OK. Abduction. Better than being shot. John takes a moment to spit out the horrible and now unnecessary cheek padding, tenses minutely, joint by joint, trying to sense any slackness in the grip on his arms.

‘And if we escape, some of your little friends come after us and kill us, I suppose?’ says Sherlock.

‘No. They kill Dr Watson, disable you and bring you back,’ replies Kolyvanov. ‘And I tell British journalists who killed Jordan Graf, Philip Zagami and Abram Tabone. After that you will be glad that I protect you.’

Then he does stand up. He has a loose way of holding his mouth; it’s in contrast with the haunted fixity of his eyes, and at home John would probably draw conclusions about Afghanistan and write up a psychiatric referral while thinking _there but for the grace of God..._ But the detail of what fires Kolyvanov is irrelevant. What’s important is that he trades on the kind of flexible half-madness that gives one hyena the edge over a pack. Maybe John can engage with that somehow... He might drop his guard...

Kolyvanov has taken a cigar from one of his cronies, and is bringing the lighted end slowly closer and closer to Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s eyes fix on it in obvious fear. He hasn’t been trained the way John has. When the embers near his cheek, he jerks back – and Kolyvanov abruptly turns on his heel and approaches John. And _oh fuck_ John is not certain he can deal with this either, with that dot of fire approaching him level with his eye... Then on the edge of vision he sees Sherlock jerk violently in the grip of the restraining thug. There is a hiss. _Tear gas._

John holds his breath. Kolyvanov has been dragged off somewhere by his minders. There’s shouting and swearing. People are choking and bending over. A couple of bruiser types are obviously trying to grope their way towards John and Sherlock, who is wheezing and wobbling on his feet. John grabs him by the arm and drags him blindly towards the exit, eyes closed. _Please God let nobody start firing in panic..._

Sherlock is resisting his pull. Sherlock is – a gun is fired. It’s Sherlock shooting. _What the –?_

‘You fucking idiot!’ John snarls. ‘You’ll make it worse – shit.’ He grabs Sherlock. ‘We just _go_.’

Sherlock is burbling something – ‘John, I don’t care, I just want to finish this, them or us. Just shoot me now and go home. Anything –’

John is not interested. The lack of extra screaming suggests that Sherlock has not hit anyone. Peering through slitted eyes, John ploughs into the stumbling, coughing crowd that blunders out into the main bar, spilling drinks and knocking over small tables. John and Sherlock make it to the exit as part of a flailing stream of bodies. Just maybe they’re getting away.

There is another shot, from behind them. Then three more, just as they make it out into the air. John sees the material jerk and rupture away from Sherlock’s upper left arm. He sees blood spray onto the dirty wall beyond Vyborgskiy’s outside staircase. But they are _not dead_ , so John keeps going, up the stairs, then down a side street. He’s dragging Sherlock, who comes without resisting now. All around them are coughing and weeping and incomprehensible accusations.

After two minutes’ running, they emerge onto a main road and follow it towards a Metro station. John stops and briefly checks Sherlock’s arm; thank God it looks like a messy but shallow flesh wound. He takes off his furry Russian hat and gives it to Sherlock to hold over the area and minimise public attention. Sherlock is shaking all over. He doesn’t speak.

John’s own thoughts are a mess. They were going to get through this. Sherlock was going to stay calm... why the hell did John believe that? This is not London. It’s not Afghanistan either, but still John is the one with the relevant skills here. He should have prevented this, should have looked after Sherlock better, should have known the plan of luring Kolyvanov aside was never going to work. John would have done better to simply trail the guy alone and shoot him. But he had expected Sherlock to be brilliant, and pull this off the way he would have done in London. Sherlock survived his own suicide, so of course he could handle this.

‘ _Never_ be the first to fire unless it’s a killshot,’ John says as they enter the brightly-lit station. Lecturing Sherlock has no point to it now but he can’t stop himself. He has to keep talking, keep them moving, keep glancing around for trouble because Sherlock most certainly isn’t doing it. At least the bloodstain has stopped creeping down his arm. ‘These people, even the scumbag element, are rich enough to have plenty to lose. It’s called civilisation. So they don’t want serious violence in public places. Why did you throw that damn gas when you did? No way was Kolyvanov going to seriously hurt us, when he wants to bloody recruit you. We could have learnt more.’

John goes ranting on. He knows that’s what it is. He’s mostly doing it to stop other words echoing in his head: _Shoot me now_. One of his Army jobs was to identify men who were starting to think like that, and send them home before any further harm was done. But he can’t send Sherlock home. He can’t love him back to sanity. He can’t arrange treatment here. He can only build himself up to kill, and force down the doubts that killing brings.

But only if Sherlock has his back.

They are on the escalator. John’s staring over the top of Sherlock’s head, down the vast descent, and it’s abundantly clear that they are not leaving here tomorrow, even if they survive.

‘How can I kill for you if you don’t want to live?’ John demands into Sherlock’s ear. ‘I shot Hope and Zagami and Tabone, and I’m OK with that, I can deal, but I need you to work with me.’

This is not good, John knows it. Sherlock’s face is hidden, staring down the escalator, and it would be better for John to vent this to anyone else, but there’s only the two of them. Right now, knowing Sherlock can’t be expected to handle this is not good enough. John needs him to handle it. John is human too. John is scared.

Sherlock clearly can’t deal. He’s shaking more now. As they stand close together John puts a hand on his back. It makes no difference.

‘I miscalculated. I should not have fired,’ says Sherlock woodenly. ‘I apologise. I...’

Sherlock trails off. John moves his hand up and down, stroking. Sherlock takes a step down the escalator then stops.

John freezes. Sherlock flinched from his touch.

Sherlock flinched from his touch.

They make for the flat in silence after that. Zoya is there, nervously looking out for them, and after a ten-second summary of events from John she sets to work gathering gauze, antiseptic and also plenty of vodka. They seat Sherlock in a kitchen chair where he stares mutely ahead.

John, crouching beside him, cuts the fabric away from his arm, tweezes fluff out of his raw flesh and then stitches up the mercifully straightforward gash. Shock, alcohol and physical trauma are plainly making Sherlock dopey, and when his eyelids finally flutter shut he actually slumps sideways into John’s arms. John just holds him close for a moment, finding that doing anything else is suddenly untenable because it would involve letting go. He is dimly conscious of Zoya watching them.

‘You very much love him,’ she says, sounding sympathetic but also surprised.

John nods. Her surprise is annoying, but he’s too tired to mount a defence of his sexuality. She seems to get that, and carries on filling the silence.

‘I had a husband,’ she says. ‘Divorced now. He took my money, then left me with his debts. And all the time he’s complaining. Men don’t like that I’m stronger than they are. My job.’ She taps her bicep.

‘Yeah,’ says John, without much vigour. Accepting a partner who is tougher than him is not currently the problem he faces. Anyway, if Sherlock breaks, John will still love him, he’s sure of that. But if Sherlock gets them both killed, then it’s game over.

‘OK, I need to get him to bed,’ he tells Zoya.

She hefts Sherlock’s torso off the chair without any signs of excessive effort, and leaves John to collect the dangling feet. Sherlock weighs less now than he did when John and Lestrade put him to bed after the Adler bitch drugged him. That seems like a lifetime ago.

Zoya and John manoeuvre Sherlock down the corridor and arrange him on one of the ottomans. Zoya goes to the door, and stands there.

‘Thanks,’ John says. ‘For, uh, quite a lot of things I guess.’ His head is fuzzy. They’d be screwed without this bolthole, and her, and he wants to communicate that, but he’s knackered. ‘We are going to sort out Kolyvanov, I promise.’

Zoya smiles oddly. ‘There is a Russian proverb about the calf that eats the wolf,’ she says.

‘That means anything’s possible, yeah? Very true,’ says John, not particularly wanting to be compared to a cow, and very much wanting to go to sleep.

‘No, it means something that could never happen,’ says Zoya. ‘So... although it is dangerous for me, tomorrow I ask people I know. People my Uncle Gleb knows. I suppose they are bandits. I always avoided troubles, but nobody likes Kolyvanov. And I don’t like your friend,’ Zoya nods around John towards the unconscious Sherlock. ‘But you came to me and I look after you.’

‘Thank you,’ says John seriously. He’s tuned in now. ‘Do you mean...’

But Zoya has closed the door on him. Her slippered tread can just be heard retreating down the hall.

OK. John really needs to know what she was talking about, but for now it will have to wait. He takes a few minutes to undress Sherlock, recheck the wound and cover him with blankets, then lies down on the other ottoman and falls asleep with military ease.

For the first time in months, he dreams of Afghanistan. He’s taken cover behind a pile of rubble, and he’s shooting and shooting at enemies he can barely see. Between him and them, Sherlock is strolling around, looking at spindly bushes through his magnifying glass, and John is frantic not to hit him, and then Kolyvanov surges over a rock, in Russian army uniform, and shoots, and Sherlock’s skull explodes like Zagami’s, and he slumps to the ground soaked with blood, and John is rooted to the spot with horror, and the soldier beside him turns out to be Zoya, and she grabs his arm and shakes him and shouts...

No. He’s awake now, and Sherlock is the one shaking him. It’s still night. There is shouting. That really is coming from Zoya.

‘ _Sookin syn! Begite, bandyty u podyezda_ – Kolyvanov’s men. My friend by gate, she know them, she ring me. They must be on stairs. Get out! Mama’s window! Go, go, now, out!’

 

**John**

They have escaped again, John allows himself to realise as he and Sherlock stumble down a snowy concrete avenue in the dark, some three miles from Zoya’s. They half-slid, half-scrambled down the drainpipe outside Mama’s window, John’s bodyweight ripping it from the wall, but fortunately not until he was four foot above a snowdrift. They have the things they managed to shove into backpacks – their electronics, their guns, and most of their documents, plus some clothes – and they are not dead.

‘I won’t believe that Zoya betrayed us,’ John says now. ‘God, I hope she’s all right.’

The fact that she probably isn’t hangs in the freezing air, and if John was with anyone except Sherlock, that person would probably say something consoling. But Sherlock isn’t talking right now. He’s looking around him at the closed shops with the muted, contemplative expression John first saw when he was looking at Jeff Hope’s pill.

Last night, John said _I need you to work with me_ , and Sherlock moved away. John needs a way to bear that, and all the rest, but there’s nothing in sight.

Fuck it, there’s at least one source of pain that he might be able to resolve, even though it’s reckless. He stops in the lee of crumbling wall, digs out one of their pay-as-you-go phones and calls Zoya, dreading equally that nobody will pick up or that one of Kolyvanov’s men will. Sherlock stops a little in front of him, showing no reaction.

‘ _Allo?_ ’ Zoya’s voice is cautious but collected.

So she’s not dead. That’s a start, though who knows what else has happened. ‘Zoya. I...’

‘ _Chto_ – you safe?! Do not come here!’

‘We weren’t going to. What happened? Are they gone?’ John scans the street scene around them. People are starting to emerge from their apartments and make for work. There’s too many of them for him to be sure if any are deliberately heading for him

‘Yes,’ says Zoya. ‘Four _localtsy_ , men who were soldiers. I had to open door or they would break it. They ran around and smashed a table and shouted at me. I said you paid for this room and I know nothing. I cried and I pretended stupid, though I have a knife in the pocket in case they attack me. They believed me, I think.’ Zoya’s voice is light enough, but trembling.

‘I’m so sorry,’ says John, heavy-hearted. He starts walking swiftly again, just hoping Sherlock will follow; he does. ‘Have you any idea how the, er, locals found us?’

‘Probably someone guessed you are not tourists. Informing on neighbours is Russian tradition.’ Zoya laughs humourlessly. ‘I do not want to live like this! Men like these killed my father. They will not kill me!’

‘No, they won’t,’ John promises, as if it’s under his control. ‘OK, I’m going to ring off. It isn’t safe for you to talk to us.’

‘ _Nyet_ , wait! I said I will ask my Uncle Gleb. I will call you with what he says. He is also an informal entrepreneur. I think that he would not go against Kolyvanov himself, but if you do it, he will help.’

‘OK. Thank you. Thank you.’ John rings off and does another routine scan of their surroundings. He would like to dwell on the thought of Zoya, but he mustn’t. He is leading them, at a carefully nonchalant speed, down a narrow, tree-lined street, and now they are far enough from the flat, John is very aware that they do not have an actual destination.

‘Apparently Kolyvanov’s sent local ex-soldiers after us,’ he says. He doesn’t really expect an answer from the silent man beside him, but Sherlock shakes his head and speaks.

‘He would have young ex-soldiers working for him,’ Sherlock says. ‘Veterans of Chechnya most likely. Russia has a conscript army, not professional soldiers. Every conflict produces a tranche of damaged or otherwise unemployable but still young men. They turn to the black economy for work.’

John almost stops walking, and looks at Sherlock hard. Is his mind waking up? That insight... at least it makes Zoya’s obsession with the unobtainability of ‘normal life’ a bit more comprehensible. John imagines being shipped by force to Afghanistan or Chechnya as a teenager and surviving three years... dear God.

‘Where are we going?’ Johns says. If Sherlock can answer that, then maybe they’re still in business. Down the road, a minibus door slams, and John tenses, but no he is not going to drop to the ground. Just because Afghanistan is mentioned does not mean he will have a flashback.

But after his brief speech, Sherlock’s eyes seem to be glazing over, like they did in Malta when he talked about fire in the sky; John remembers the sight of Sherlock fighting and fighting that. Now he just strides mechanically forwards.

‘I would like to lie down in the snow and die,’ says Sherlock as if reporting an observation. ‘I understand however that this impulse arises from imbalanced chemistry, and will not use it as a guide to action.’

Christ. In one way John is getting used to pronouncements like that, in another – never.

‘Are you thinking you failed me last night?’ John says. There is a woman looking at them from an upstairs window across the road and it is all he can do not to draw his pistol, and – ‘Look, I vented at you, but we both bodged up. It happens. What matters is we’re alive to try again.’

It’s not clear to John whether Sherlock takes that on board or not. His reply, after a long moment of thought is: ‘It’s unlikely that Kolyvanov has ordered Mrs Hudson and Lestrade shot yet. He really does appear to want me, and as yet to be unaware that I am no longer of any use, so he hasn’t spent his bargaining chips. But if I was him, at this point I might start doing so.’

John feels a chill in his spine. He has not been thinking about things that are outside his immediate control. Trust Sherlock to do it... and it’s clearly necessary.

Sherlock stops abruptly, in the lee of a shuttered kiosk, and sits down on a cinderblock. John’s heart pounds – has Sherlock finally ground to a halt? But no, he’s fiddling with his phone. In spite of the glaze on his eyes he does look just a little more like himself. Is it shock, or a moodswing? Could John dare to hope it’s the lithium?

John himself is out of ideas. He needs Sherlock to do something brilliant. That’s what always happens at this point. Isn’t it?

Sherlock has his phone out.

‘So I’ll tell him he’s going to get me,’ he says, poking a button. ‘It’ll win us time, and maybe I’ll be able to think..’

John’s stomach drops. Either this is total insanity, or a sound move that will get Kolyvanov to ease off long enough for them to regroup and contact ‘Uncle Gleb’. He half-expects the call to fail but no, Sherlock gets through, and introduces himself as if this really is a civilised job interview. John leans in to hear.

‘You haven’t left me much choice, Mr Kolyvanov,’ Sherlock says, his voice perfectly pitched to weary resentment with a tinge of admiration. ‘What exactly does the position involve?’

‘I receive thousands of reports from Piter and all Russia, and half are lies or confusion by stupid people,’ comes the tinny reply. ‘You can sort out it. You see patterns, see where things will happen.’

‘I don’t speak Russian.’

‘You can learn in two weeks. I know what you are. A mind like Moriarty, but you don’t care to be master. I take that responsibility. You get an inside vista on every racket from London to Vladivostok, Mr Holmes, and I can pay extremely well. Don’t tell me you aren’t interested.’

John holds his breath. Kolyvanov evidently does have a good handle on what Sherlock is, but not _that_ good, or he wouldn’t be using money as a lure.

‘You’re telling me how valuable I am to you, not what you can do for me,’ says Sherlock, and the tone of faltering bravado is so real John has to draw back and glance at him, and see his cold eyes fixed on the deserted kiosk.

There is a sarcastic sigh on the other end of the phone.

‘Maybe you are only man in Europe that truly does not care about money,’ says Kolyvanov. ‘In that case, I remind you, do you want the BBC journalists to know who killed Graf? What I do for you is obvious. You do whatever you wish and I can protect you. I even give you nice apartment, to live with your very good friend.’

Sherlock waits out a long pause. ‘ _Fuck_ you,’ he mutters, like a man cornered.

‘Ah, no, you don’t fuck me. Come to my office, Monday afternoon, three o’clock,’ says Kolyvanov. ‘Without guns, of course. We will arrange it then.’

Sherlock starts to speak but Kolyvanov has apparently rung off. John suddenly finds that his knees are wobbling, and he has to sit down on the cinderblock.

‘Imbecile,’ says Sherlock contemptuously. ‘He actually thinks I’ll be scared of people knowing we’re gay.’

‘Yeah, how ridiculous,’ says John. He doesn’t mention that they really are shit scared that Kolyvanov will shoot their friends and tell the media who killed Graf and Zagami. ‘OK, that was a risk, but you probably bought us two and a half days. Anything could happen in that time.’ The lithium could kick in – is this it? Is it starting? ‘Gleb could come through with something or we could get another lead.’

‘But where’s Kolyvanov getting this stuff?’ says Sherlock, taking off his Russian hat and rubbing his gloved hand vigorously through his hair the way he used to when he was frustrated, when he was himself. ‘I don’t recall us snogging in public. John, something’s bothering me.’

‘What?’ The idea of picking a single worry out of the million contenders seems ridiculous.

‘Please tell me we still have the list of Kolyvanov Securities staff.’

‘Um, yeah, I put it with our papers, and I grabbed them when we scarpered. Why?’ says John, reaching for the papers in question.

‘Give,’ says Sherlock, and holds out his hand. When John obeys, Sherlock briefly scans the list and then sits back against the frosty kiosk wall. ‘Ah. Here we go: Senior Consultant Gleb Yevdokimov. It’s a common enough surname, and there’s a Marya Yevdokimova on reception, but I think we must conclude that your little girlfriend is how Kolyvanov found us.’

Shit. Shit, shit, _shit_. John stammers, trying to think: ‘Maybe Zoya doesn’t know he actually works for... I mean, why would she mention him to us, if...’

‘Because people are arrogant, John, and incompetent, and like to show off by waving facts under my nose and thinking I won’t notice. But I’m not that damaged yet.’ Sherlock sounds grimly satisfied. John wants to belt him, and is madly relieved at that feeling, because it means the git is becoming himself again, and for that this is _almost_ worth it... except that Sherlock is leaning back against the grubby kiosk, visibly winding down, whatever has powered him for the last five minutes draining from his expression.

‘Sherlock!’ John almost shouts. ‘If you worked all that out, you can work out what the bloody hell we do now, then!’

‘Shoot ourselves in the head?’ suggests Sherlock. His eyes roam vaguely, then settle on a snowy bollard.

When John tries to budge him, at first he won’t move. _Right, this is it, he’s truly lost it,_ thinks John, almost dreamily... then Sherlock gets up, and starts walking mechanically ahead. John has to follow, without the slightest idea of where they are going, or to what possible end.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having failed to take down Kolyvanov, Sherlock and John are trapped and desperate. The lithium Sherlock is taking to combat his bipolar is having no effect, and his endurance is running out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the mental health trigger warnings should be taken very seriously for this chapter in particular.

**Sherlock**

Four o’clock on Monday morning. Sherlock paces barefoot back and forth on a ruined carpet. They are in the north of Vasilevsky island, somewhere in a sprawl of towerblocks that makes Thamesmead look like a village, in an eleventh-floor flat that has been abandoned mid-overhaul by some bankrupt or neglectful landlord. Of the two bedrooms, one has been freshly wallpapered and contains John, whom Sherlock left asleep on the floor rolled up in a blanket. The other bears signs of use by teenagers or squatters, with scrawled graffiti and charring in one corner.

This is where Sherlock paces, back and forth, eight steps each way. Then around in a circle of nineteen. He is containing himself. Quarantine. Letting John sleep.

This has been their base while they wait for Monday afternoon. They are not just waiting, of course; Sherlock has been thinking, or he has promised John that he has been thinking. In fact, after his final forced performance on the phone to Kolyvanov, something in his mind has snapped, or gone. He can think of nothing except to do as the mafioso says, to save Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. Kolyvanov’s threat is not an original one but it does not need to be: copying Moriarty has the desired effect.

All through this, Sherlock has been dutifully taking lithium. It hasn’t worked, and he is unsurprised. If he believed substances ultimately help, he would find his own cocaine. But at best a drug could only mask the core reality, which is that Sherlock is wrong, not about facts as a little mind might be, because his apprehension of facts remains unimpeded to the point where his consciousness is a tuning fork for the resonance of pain, but purely wrong in himself. He knows this, as they spend their days scrabbling for non-existent ways to get at Kolyvanov without being captured, and their nights cowering here. John rarely looks at him, and when he does it is with a distorted expression that Sherlock’s intellect reports to be distress and concern, and yet he knows that his intellect is incorrect, and John feels disgust. Sherlock is a liability.

He has failed. It would have been better to let John continue believing in Zoya; they are screwed anyway. Instead, John has stopped answering her calls. There is no plan now except to wait for Sherlock to get better. That does not happen.

What has happened is that violence has built up inside him, burgeoning until he feels it slamming against his skin. There are no distractions here. The only sound is the ping and click of metal expanding and contracting as the building’s heating system vies with the snowfall. Sherlock is infested with a sensation like white noise that drives his limbs as he paces eights steps from some Cyrillic scrawl on one side of the room to the window on the other. The window is a rectangle of half-dark, eerily snow-lit from underneath. When he looks out and eleven floors down, he sees a huge communal area dotted with smaller buildings and bounded by a march of towerblocks. Beyond them, a faint line in the farthest darkness marks where frigid sea meets sky.

He has come to the edge of the world. To the edge of himself. Everyone is behind him now. Again he remembers Zoya. For John’s sake, he almost liked her. For a while she seemed to help, like Molly, who also looked at him with that dreadful all-smothering female pity, just because he is not like her, not governed by emotion... and that is a lie. He is broken. _Who did this to him?_ No one. His mother. His genes are corrupted.

Corrupted. Sherlock shakes his head. There is acid and static in his brain, but rationally he identifies the sensations as chemical malfunction, and remembers the words in John’s voice, _bipolar disorder_. Rational, survivable. He is aware of tossing his head, and whimpering, and continuing, and he is thinking very clearly and calmly, _I am not doing this_ , because he is Sherlock Holmes, and he would never... No.

Earlier in a crowded street he repeated to John that John’s best chance of survival lay in Sherlock’s going to work for Kolyvanov, and John shouted ‘I can’t leave you!’ Sherlock wondered why the hell not, and simply walked away and then ran, and managed to lose John. It felt like the proof of something terrible and inevitable as he blundered down random streets, body slowing until he felt like an old man picking through the ubiquitous lumps of ice, his mind suffocating, his vision a blur of ungraspable gibberish. There is nothing holding John to him, he realised. He has never believed in human ties anyway, so why this one? 

One of his phones kept ringing and eventually he answered. It was John, making various assertions that he liberally qualified with _bloody sodding fucking hell_ s. ‘Stay right there, I’m coming to find you,’ John said at last, so for a while Sherlock wandered up and down the same sparsely-peopled side street, trying to think of nothing, or even not think. How do you not think? 

A ginger tom was lying stiff in the snowy gutter. Sherlock walked past twice, but on the third pass he knelt beside it with his magnifying glass. He deduced the time of its death and the angle and nature of the vehicle strike, and then he could not look away, although a woman across the road was staring, because something had changed in his relationship with death. Death was no longer an external fact for him to study and assess, but an extension of his self, a home, a language far more intimate than words. He touched the cat’s bloodied, frozen face, and accepted the need to balance the equation between his own sound body and broken mind. He needed, needs to die. The clarity of that is terror and relief. 

_No_. Sherlock is here, and even asleep John grounds him. Sherlock is reason. Sherlock is in this room on Vasilevsky Island and he will hold his mind intact, through reason. He wheels and paces right up to the wall again. He cannot read the words – _Эта женщина больна, эта женщина одна... Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает... Ночь..._ – but he is Sherlock, and he can and will read the world itself instead. The graffiti, apparently lyrics, was written by a tall female with long fingers. She was using an isopropanol-based marker pen. Yes, that is reason. Facts in their place, like the solidity of the towerblocks beyond the window, the itch of the mouldering carpet under his toes, the pressure of his hands clutching the sides of his head, the knowledge that there is no way out, that he has failed John, that he cannot read, cannot think, acid is eating his brain... Sherlock falls to his knees, hands hitting dirty concrete where the carpet is ripped, and grit bites into his palms, and the pain is a fragment of life, as if this was SM, but no touch answers his.

There _was_ John... Sherlock searches his mind for John, catching at images and sense traces: how he met John’s eyes over police tape at the college, how he fell through grief and pain and John fucked him and held him and loved him. The memories glint, defined and perfect, then spin away from his grasp, pebble-smooth and inaccessible as snowglobes. Sherlock rolls onto his back in the dust and thinks _John, John_ , and he cannot remember meaning or taste or texture but the name still has weight to it, the heft of a hand taking his hand, although there is nothing there and his knuckles scrape concrete.

It is not enough. Sherlock’s life is being taken from him, as surely as if Kolyvanov had shot him. Worms riddle his brain, and his head jerks up, down, up, because there is no way out of this thing that is not a thing and is everything. Far above the suffering, his sovereign intellect reports that he is going insane, and he holds on to John’s phantom hand as he lets the fantasies irrupt: he walks into the sea as his mother did... he buys chemicals from a corner kiosk and dies convulsing and biting through his tongue... he pays Kolyvanov to kill him so his suicide will bring John less pain... he takes the rope from the bottom of John’s backpack, attaches it to the exposed girder in the half-wrecked ceiling over his head and chokes and thrashes as he dies... _Die_. It is a command and a solace, a duty and a right. After all, John was angry with his failure at Bart’s. It is logical to complete what he started and align flesh with reality. He could go to John now, and ease one of the pistols from underneath his sleeping body. John might even wake, and sit up, and see, and Sherlock would shove the grease-cold barrel against the back of his throat, and John would nod, smiling a cold, mild smile, and Sherlock would... so good, so right. Release.

 _No_. In the graffiti room he staggers back to his feet. All he wants is a moment of forgetfulness, rest from fighting this, freedom to simply yank open the window that is metres from his head, climb over the sill and _end_ – but inside him is a stark, stripped voice, repeating _Please don’t kill yourself_ , and if he cannot identify or answer it then still it allies with the fragment-self that pins him to the body that breathes and moves and blinks and wants to piss. There is nothing to worry about: he cannot be mad, not when he is so relentlessly present in his exhausted flesh, this ragged, snow-lit room. Foul images teem like flies from the root of him. Blood. Entrails. Kolyvanov. Death. _Please don’t kill yourself_. Yet the only way to escape from death is to die. He must get closer to death.

Sherlock stumbles over and throws open the window so that it hits the wall with a crash. He leans outside. A freezing snow-flurry slams into him as he looks down eleven floors at the bland whiteness of the ground, and imagines his body ruptured and still, blood staining the snow, internal and external realities at one. Such violence, such peace, and the suffering would disperse like breath into the wind that whips ice into his face as he leans further out, lifting his knee to the sill. In three seconds he could be dying. _Massive blunt force trauma_ : there is relief in the description, its solid, impersonal truth. Mundane concepts atomise into disconnected slivers – _John. lithium. hope. John_. – and are carried away on the gale. Meaning is no longer relevant. Sherlock rolls his head down, up, down with the currents of air. All that is left to him is what he sees, white ground, black sky and grey buildings between. The anticipation, the tangible imminence of death.

In the furthest of the huge apartment blocks, something catches his eye.

Sherlock blinks. Automatically his mind attempts to identify and deduce... but it skids on an absence of detail. All he knows is that he observed movement. Then he sees it again, in a block much closer to him, and realises: it’s a light flickering on in someone’s window. Every few seconds, in fact, now that he pays attention, he can see a tiny square somewhere in the maze of concrete either kindle to yellow or fade to black. He draws back a little, knee still on the ledge but body almost vertical, and stares at the slow dance of the lights. It has no system and no meaning, but it gives him pause. Like London, St Petersburg is a city of souls. Sherlock is suspended among them, between Zoya and Kolyvanov, between the distant lights and the lines on the wall, between his mangled corpse and John’s warm body spooned around him. He is of the world. No respite.

 _Please don’t kill yourself..._ he remembers. _You’re why I stopped._

Behind him, Sherlock hears a faint creak. And the voice:

‘Sherlock? Fuck – get away from the window! _SHERLOCK!_ ’

 

**John**

John stirs in his blankets, dimly aware of a noise elsewhere in the flat. Sherlock seems to be gone from his side; probably having a piss. John hopes he hasn’t blundered into Mama Yevdokimova’s room, which was a mistake John nearly made the other night.

John wraps himself more tightly in the covers, and lets his mind wander on the edge of dreams. He’s warm and drowsy and vaguely aware that there are facts he’s forgotten, but he doesn’t want to retrieve them right now. His thoughts wander to the exposed beam in the other room, and how he would bind Sherlock’s hands over his head and Sherlock’s long body would stretch down naked from his captured wrists to his waist. In John’s mind, Sherlock is not gaunt but simply lean, muscled and healthy again. His dark hair curls against his neck, and when John looks into his eyes Sherlock is _there_ , expectant and arrogant and fierce.

When a braided whip appears in John’s hand he strikes with perfect accuracy at Sherlock’s naked back and jeans-clad arse. Sherlock jerks and cries out, his bare feet scuffing the floor. John sees and owns the twist of his muscles as he struggles to cope with the pain, and the arch and flow of his neck as he masters it, whimpering out hurt and arousal and need. The fantasy blurs, and simultaneously John is behind Sherlock, hurting him, and in front of him, holding his waist, kissing him, tasting and sharing heat and want. ‘John, it hurts,’ moans Sherlock, and the pain in his voice is aphrodisiac, and John holds him tight and bites his throat while Sherlock ruts against him, because this is how they make love, out of nothing, out of fear and grief and the world’s rejects, a profusion of kisses, welts, pain, comfort, need and satiety, and John throws out his whip arm... and it hits the hard floor, and he wakes up properly, and Sherlock is not with him.

John sits up and rubs his eyes. He feels heavy, with the beginnings of a headache at the base of his skull. Now he remembers where he is, and registers that Sherlock has been gone for some time. That is unlikely to mean anything good.

John does not panic. If he was going to do that, it would have happened at some point during the dismal past two days they’ve spent scrabbling around the edges of Piter’s criminal underground, achieving nothing, while Sherlock visibly fades. Instead, he wraps himself in a couple of blankets and pads out into the chilly corridor, alert for sounds. The lithium isn’t working, he knows that much, and Sherlock has point-blank refused an additional anti-depressant. After they were up most of Saturday night fruitlessly chasing an elusive contact from bar to bar, John had planned to get a good night’s sleep and then do... something. Something decisive, somehow. He feels that he’s been waiting, without even knowing for what, and Monday afternoon is getting close.

When he hears sounds in the other bedroom, he can’t quite identify them. A last wisp of sleep seems wrapped around him, as if this were nothing more than a small-hours excursion to the bathroom at Baker Street. Blearily, he opens the door.

The icy air on the far side wakens him like a slap. A trail of snow is scattered, melting, across the charred carpet. It leads to the window, where Sherlock, in jeans and a thin sweatshirt, is leaning out into the air, kept from falling only by his knee on the sill and one hand on the frame.

John’s eyes fix on that hand, where it grips the plastic. Such long fingers Sherlock has, he thinks. Such long, elegant fingers to search a body or draw a violin bow or twine with his own. Those thoughts fill his mind. They are trying to block the entry of the realisation that this is what he was waiting for: to fail, to see Sherlock die. Again.

The horror and the grief are not banished, they are the one reality. The rest was a dream.

‘Sherlock! Fuck – get away from the window! _SHERLOCK!_ ’

John is shouting, and he doesn’t know how he’s doing it, because inside he is pant-pissing terrified. The bravery and the fighting and the bearing and the coping were only swagger, because he cannot handle this reality, the final confirmation that he is just a fool in love with a madman who will die. But he’s trying anyway, he’s starting across the acre of floor, feeling like his limbs are lead.

Then, before John can reach him, Sherlock has coiled around somehow, and is thank God fully inside the building. His feet hit the floor and he stands half-crouched, staring at John with his head cocked like a bird. His eyes glint in the half-dark against the backdrop of whirling snow, but there is so little expression in them that John almost wonders if this is really him.

‘ _What?_ ’ Sherlock demands. His voice is contemptuous, distant. Has he had a psychotic break? John cannot handle this.

John _will_ handle this. He has treated acutely traumatised soldiers, more than one of them suicidal. He had more drugs to hand then, but really you cannot ‘save’ someone. You can only offer your human self. And John dedicated himself to Sherlock some time ago.

He unwinds one of the blankets from his shoulders and holds it out. His hand is trembling.

‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Come back. Whatever is – I – please, you.’ Apparently dealing is one thing and making sense another. ‘Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock...’

Possibly John’s gone mad himself, because he can’t stop repeating the name. Sherlock stops him by taking the blanket, if only to drape it over his arm, and shutting the window.

The movements are so ordinary that John feels his heartbeat settle. He reclaims the blanket and drapes it around Sherlock’s shoulders, and Sherlock huddles into the extra warmth, as if he was coming back to his body. John steers him towards the wall and he leans against it then slides down to sit, his head bisecting the Cyrillic graffiti _Где же ты теперь, воля вольная?_ John bloody well hopes that means something pleasant. He himself sits on the floor as well, watching as Sherlock continues to come at least part way back, his face losing some of its rigidity, the look in his eyes exhausted and scared but more natural.

‘Of course – I’m bloody – I’m here,’ says Sherlock, though the words crack so badly that John has to fill in missing syllables. John reaches for Sherlock’s hand, which is freezing, and presses it between both his own. 

‘Sherlock, what’s the fucking point of me loving you if –’ John stops because it is not the right time for a rant, and then starts again because he can’t leave that sentence hanging. – if you’re going to die again?’

A long pause. John scrambles to collect himself enough to speak calmly the next time.

‘I was trying _not_ to kill myself,’ says Sherlock. ‘I...’

Another pause. John squeezes Sherlock’s fingers, and Sherlock’s thumb curls around John’s in response. What Sherlock said doesn’t make a lot of sense, but John is trying to believe it, because the alternative... he cannot protect Sherlock from the alternative, not alone. He needs the resources of the NHS, and specialists, and probably a locked ward. Oh God, Sherlock on a locked ward... better than Sherlock dead.

‘OK, but you – you weren’t doing very well,’ John says, letting his words catch and trip over each other. ‘Do _not_ leave me! We’ll sort out Kolyvanov somehow. We are going to get home, and you are going to get better. I know you can do this. I know how strong you can be.’

John hopes for a response, but Sherlock stays silent. His body is limp, with his back against the wall and his legs flung out akimbo. He seems to be retreating inside himself, and John does not want to let him go. He grips tighter, and Sherlock looks down at their entwined hands, as if in thought.

‘Before I met you I would not have bothered to try,’ he says. It comes out all in one smooth sentence, almost normal-sounding, and John has to think for a moment before he matches it with Sherlock’s previous words.

Jesus Christ. There isn’t really a follow-up to that, or not one that doesn’t involve John sobbing. He rubs a hand over his face, leans forward to hug Sherlock, and then stops himself, because Sherlock really is unnaturally still now, as if he had simply switched off, and pawing at an unresponsive body is not what John wants to do either.

‘Sherlock, you are taking the lithium, aren’t you?’ asks John sharply. ‘Lithium and nothing else?’ The man sprawled in front of him looks all too much like he must have done when...

‘Yes,’ Sherlock says, his voice slightly slurred.

John relaxes a little, and arranges the blanket more tightly around Sherlock’s shoulders. He is slumping inch by inch further down the wall, as crumpled as if he’d just landed there after being thrown. The sight is frightening; and it actually makes John a little less afraid. It’s necessary communication, Sherlock finally allowing John to see just how ill he is.

‘I still think the lithium will kick in,’ John says. ‘If it doesn’t, we add an antidepressant.’

Sherlock doesn’t respond. He has his head turned as if he was listening to something inside. Maybe he is, or maybe he’s just stalled and is thinking of nothing.

John could worry about that but it wouldn’t help. Instead, he scoots around to sit against the wall, placing his hand in Sherlock’s before fixing his eyes on some Cyrillic scrawl and trying to sound it out as a way of inducing patience. Before long he fails to remember what the letter that looks like a ‘3’ sounds like and gives up. So much for that.

John looks side-on at Sherlock. He seems to be thinking, except that the unnatural stillness of his face, as he apparently studies his own forearm protruding limply from the blanket, gives him away.

‘Sherlock?’ says John. He would rather let Sherlock come back in his own time, but the thought of him somehow wandering lost in the ruins of his mind palace until he’s out of reach... ‘Sherlock!’

Sherlock draws his knees part-way up, leans forwards and starts to bang his head from side to side. He is staring with a bewildered, utterly inward gaze. His eyes and also his clenched teeth glint in the half-light. A low moan intermittently escapes him.

Jesus. John doesn’t, can’t, think. He just moves around in front of Sherlock, wraps an arm around his shoulders and tries to simply be present. For a few seconds they sway awkwardly together, then abruptly Sherlock goes statue-still again. John is steeling himself to accept this when Sherlock pulls away with such a jerk that his head thuds against the wall.

‘I am behaving insanely!’ he announces in an almost conversational voice. ‘I am not physically...’ Sherlock stops talking as if a signal had cut out. ‘... impaired,’ he finishes three seconds later. ‘I do not want normal, but.... I can tell a man’s life history from his clothes but I am losing the end of sentences. If my brain is broken, what’s the _use_?’

The sound of Sherlock’s voice is a relief in itself. Yet he is apparently fighting to analyse his own thought processes while they disintegrate.

‘Well, things can be broken but still powerful,’ he manages to say almost lightly. ‘Like... like... Chernobyl.’

Sherlock brings a hand up and slaps himself on the side of the head.

‘Chernobyl!’ he says, and there is a ghost of amusement in his voice. ‘What do you think.... in here?’

John watches intently, his thoughts racing. He _will_ help.

‘I think you’re very deep inside yourself,’ he says. ‘But you’ve left a part at the surface so we can talk. An avatar.’

‘Yes. Ten per cent... of me. Ten per cent is ample for holding –’ a long pause, and a nod that seems strangely drunken, like the slap ‘– a conversation with you. Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise for being ill,’ John says, slightly heartened by Sherlock's ability to insult him. ‘You can only manage what you can manage.’

Sherlock doesn't respond to the platitude. Instead he lurches to his feet to stand there looming and swaying slightly.

‘Only?’ he demands, voice suddenly almost crisp. ‘I can “manage” anything, John! It’s _all_ a choice!’

Jesus, now what? John blunders to his own feet, trying not to twist his numb ankle. Before he can work out what else to do, Sherlock almost skips into the middle of the floor and _becomes someone else_... It’s Zoya, doing what John thinks of as the ‘mad foreigners in my flat’ routine, with one hand nervously rubbing the other forearm. Then Sherlock shifts, and he’s Kolyvanov, piercing-eyed and open-mouthed, extending a hand with an invisible cigar toward John’s eye. The impressions are pitch-perfect.

‘What...?’ demands John, utterly freaked. ‘What...?’

Sherlock snaps back to being himself. He steeples his trembling hands at his lips.

‘The point, John, is that everything is an act. I choose to be weak or I choose to cope. Everything is willpower, and I am...’ Sherlock’s voice is vibrating with tension and disgust. ‘There is no excuse for me. No excuse for what I inflict.’

John massages his forehead. 'OK, fine. Sometimes there is no excuse for the way you behave, you’re bloody right. But it’s you all over, to admit that at the one moment when it’s absolutely not the case! Do you actually think you chose to be ill, and I should blame you for it? Sherlock, even in the army they don’t make you march until you drop dead!’

‘I do not see the relevance of that statement,’ Sherlock replies in a low, almost threatening voice. He's scrutinising John as if expecting an attack.

‘Well I do!’ John has to suppress an hysterical laugh. ‘You are desperately bloody ill, and I can see it’s not an act even if you can’t. What you’re doing right now, putting on this show, is using resources you don’t really have. You’re chopping up bits of yourself and chucking them on the fire for fuel. And yes, it’s amazing that you’ve got the willpower to do that. But it terrifies me, because it’s also the surest fucking route out the window!’

John stops. He thought he was going to say more, maybe soften the message, but with Sherlock there would be little point. Either reality works on him, or nothing will. So John gives him space, adjusting the blanket around his own shoulders.

When he looks up, he regrets his inattention. Sherlock has moved back to lean against the wall, hunching over, hugging himself as if cold.

‘What do you suggest, then?’ he says, looking up in the half-darkness. The familiar bitterness in his tone is easier to bear than the new humility blended with it. ‘I should accept... the loss of my mind?’

‘It isn’t lost for good,’ says John. ‘You should fight – but not now. When the time comes. When we take down Kolyvanov.’

‘And you believe we will do that? With me like this?’

Silence. John is caught between a lie and what he fears is the truth.

‘I do not know how to bear this,’ Sherlock says, as if explaining, as he slides down the wall and then tips over to lie on the blanket. ‘I seldom experience the impulse... to cry. Now... capacity is gone.’

John goes down on his knees, and tucks the blanket around Sherlock. ‘I understand. I’m not going anywhere. Just quit doing live commentary on your own nervous breakdown.’ Pause. ‘Or maybe you can’t stop.’ Maybe it’s what Sherlock has left.

Sherlock convulses, drawing his head down under the blanket and his legs up into foetal position. John strokes a ginger curl that pokes out into the air, and waits.

‘I remain able to refrain... from this exhibition, yet... on medical advice...’ Sherlock says, voice muffled. ‘If I am a machine, I... self-diagnostic. Abhorrent... Misfire.’

‘You’re not a machine,’ says John. That word is his fault, but at least that gives him the right to deny it. ‘You’re a genius. We aren’t dead yet, and we’ll get the better of Kolyvanov, because...’

John does not actually know because what. He pauses for a moment to take stock, and listens to Sherlock’s breathing – it’s no longer quick and pained. Instead it’s slowing down, drawing out, and as John waits he realises to his surprise and relief that Sherlock is actually falling asleep. Eventually he hears a little snore.

Either Sherlock is faking, which seems unlikely at the moment, or some healthy part of his mind has mercifully shut him down. This is an unexpected respite.

John goes to the window and leans an elbow on the sill. He can hear his own breath, and Sherlock’s, and the moan of the wind outside as snow whirls past. He looks at his palm and fingers, and they curl into a fist on their own while his mind seems to be blank. Delayed shock, he registers.

Looking outside, he sees what Sherlock must have seen when he crouched here – hundreds of windows, mostly dark, with a few lights coming on. Down on one of the plank-paths laid across the snow a small figure is trudging towards the door of the boiler room for this block. The day is starting, even though, this far north, dawn doesn’t come until mid-morning.

Ordinary life. The kind of things that always tether John to earth, even in battles where death and extremity are standard. To Sherlock they are data at best, and usually just inanities. Is Sherlock right? Is their best and kindest hope for John to take his gun, lie down with his temple against Sherlock’s, and...

The shock detonates.

John doubles over, torched by the horror of things he has seen, and things barely averted, and what might happen yet. Tears course down his cheeks and he bites into his fist to keep silent. So many times he has failed to protect the ones he loves, and almost it happened again. It _will not_. Not because of a treatable illness, and certainly not for a thug like Kolyvanov, who thinks he survived Afghanistan but instead was driven mad.

John survived. His rage is a living rage. He is a soldier, and he has the measure of darkness and fire. While Sherlock fights in the world, John will fight beside him. While Sherlock fights in his head, John will stand guard.

He straightens up. He must not make a noise so he marshals control in each of his limbs before padding through the dark to the wallpaper room, and returning with his clothes, a gun and the flat’s one wooden chair. Sherlock must not wake alone, so John fights off his own need for sleep, arranging himself bolt upright and turning over plans in his mind.

None of the plans are viable. He is not a strategist, he knows, and when on guard duty in the army he usually daydreamed of the wife and the kids and the semi that he never seemed to want when he got home again. Now for sustenance he turns to images of himself and Sherlock back in London, running, laughing, fucking, chasing criminals over rooftops. That is the life they chose. They will survive to return to it.

Snow falls, and the night lengthens.

Out in the hallway, there is a harsh buzz.

It’s the door entry system. John stiffens. He grasps his gun and heads into the dark corridor. The buzzer goes again, twice. Then silence.

Sherlock appears in the door of the graffiti room, a dishevelled silhouette. What mental state he’s in, John has no idea, but it’s possible sleep has helped. John assumes it has; they’re probably dead otherwise.

‘It could be a mistake,’ says John, staring at the white entryphone, which of course tells him nothing. ‘But that’s not how our luck goes. Grab the important stuff, quickly. Your gun’s in the wallpaper room. Get ready to shoot and run.’

Sherlock nods and does what he’s told. By the time he comes back, dressed, the buzzer is going bananas.

‘If they were going to shoot their way in, they’d have done it,’ says Sherlock. ‘If we make them talk to us we at least gain data.’ He picks up the handset and says in a disguised voice, ‘ _Zdravstvuite?_ ’

Heart beating, John leans in to listen.

‘Sherlock Holmes, idiot, let me in, or ask John to come down if you are suspicious! Everyone is looking! It’s me, Zoya!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some rather fantastic [Four Corners icons, postcards and book covers](http://rranneverse.weebly.com/four-corners-of-the-western-world.html), made by rranne.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zoya has traced John and Sherlock to their refuge on Vasilevsky Island, and she has a proposition to make. Can they trust her? There’s not much choice…

**Sherlock**

John lets Zoya in, and Sherlock does not stop him. If John’s sentimentality kills them, well then they die.

She comes bursting into the flat in a flurry of melting snow and rustling white puffa jacket, clutching a bag that appears to contain food. John instigates an awkward bumble to get the three of them into the graffiti room, where the light is best.

‘Um, do sit,’ John gestures at the least manky bit of carpet. ‘Um... yes.’

‘Why are you here?’ Sherlock asks.

Zoya doesn’t move, or immediately reply. Sherlock watches her expression in the dim, reflected-snow light. Amongst other things, she’s nervous, and he’s feeling a flicker of curiosity as to why. His brain sparks a little.

‘I know who you are!’ Zoya says, turning to Sherlock. ‘Gleb told me you are detective Sherlock Holmes, who killed Moriarty. And you are bachelor John Watson.’ She faces John. ‘I read more articles online.’

John rubs his hand over his face. ‘Yes... well, that’s true. How did you find us?’

‘I have contacts,’ says Zoya, and sighs. ‘My ex-husband, he helps sometimes. I have people watching for you. Kolyvanov pays, but nobody trusts him. But I am close to people.’ Zoya pauses and smiles rather bitterly. ‘We are that kind of family.’

‘Right,’ says John.

Perhaps John thinks it would be rude to ask whether armed thugs are about to break in and kill them. But mostly he just looks like he can’t quite rouse himself. Has he been awake since their conversation? Sherlock recalls the night, but as if through a film of gauze. His moods still shift, between mobile and immobile pain, and this is mobile. He will focus. He paces, feeling the shape of a truth through the fog.

‘Mama is close to people, isn’t she,’ Sherlock says. ‘Mama is close to Uncle Gleb, and she reported us.’

Zoya shoots him a look of blended respect and dislike.

‘Mama hates him, actually,’ she says. ‘But yes, he paid her five hundred dollars for information, and that is why the _localtsy_ came. If I had spoken to Gleb first, that would also be risk for you but I would try to persuade him he can use you to kill Kolyvanov and become boss himself. Unfortunately Mama spoke first. I’m sorry, John,’ she says, turning to him. ‘I always try not to be involved, and always I am. If you stay in Piter after this, maybe you can meet some normal people, but my family are bandits, and they talk about honour but really it means nobody is loyal to anybody and people expect to gain from reporting others. I hate it, and I want to live differently, but maybe they are right – _kto kovo_. I am just fed up of being that “whom”.’

Zoya shrugs. John is looking at her as if expecting explanation of the Russian words, but they’re clearly not going to get it. Zoya seems to believe, perhaps honestly, that she’s making a moral stand of some kind. That doesn’t answer the question of why she’s here, but Sherlock can fill in the details.

‘So, Gleb offered you money to find us,’ he says, reaching the far wall and turning on his heel. He’s running on will and fumes; if he keeps moving, he will not seize up. ‘But you’re here talking to us, which means you didn’t take it. Either you think we’ll pay you more to keep quiet... No, there’s not enough money in that. You’ll pretend to be John’s little girlfriend until you can sell me to Kolyvanov direct.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ John protests. ‘Zoya, don’t worry, he’s not seriously accusing you of that.’

John is correct. Sherlock wanted to observe Zoya’s reaction, which he sees is indignant, and natural enough to suggest a clean conscience. Yet the idea of her deceit blends so easily with the darkness in his head that it becomes more arresting the more he thinks about it. Zoya and John are both human, and clean, of course they would join hands and leave him. The conviction gathers as a sick roil in his throat.

He is not thinking right. He must correct himself.

But that directive is abstract. The threat is real.

‘I know what you want!’ Sherlock snarls, snapping his head around towards John. ‘You and her.’

John stares back, uncomprehending. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he says with a careful calm. ‘We’ll talk about it later. Zoya, I’m sorry about this. Sherlock is... unwell.’

‘You told me,’ says Zoya says, her face in darkness. ‘But the articles say he is a genius and has helped many people. Also, he is right that Gleb offers me five thousand dollars to find where you are. But no I will not tell him, because I am a decent, normal person. If you want, I will leave and never say you are here, I absolutely promise.’

‘We appreciate that,’ says John. The words bubble and crack in Sherlock’s ears. A light snaps on in a window near the flat, and Zoya and John are both illuminated, and they match. They are small and firm and precious, and Sherlock is... Sherlock is death. John would not let him die when his moment came, and this is an after-time when what remains of him crouches out of reach while data piles and crumbles like dirt in his head. No deduction.

Agony.

_Think._

‘What else are you offering?’ Sherlock prompts. He is impersonating himself. He does a mocking tilt of the head towards Zoya. An ‘or’ was surely on the way before John interrupted her.

‘Or if you pay me ten thousand dollars I will help you kill Kolyvanov,’ Zoya says. ‘I should have offered before but I was afraid. It’s not fair that you come to me and I make things worse. Now I help.’

_Ah._

Nobody speaks for a moment. John is probably taken aback by the financial demand, as he likes to sentimentalise women. Zoya is glowering defiantly. And Sherlock... if Sherlock has to cradle his poisoned brain in his own hand to do it, he _will_ deduce. Element by element he parses Zoya’s body: the glint of newly-bitten nails that betray increased anxiety, the contoured hip that speaks of a gun concealed under winter layers. All of it tells of her current undertaking, but none of it actually proves that she is on their side.

As if she would be. She’s on her own side, standing up for her idea of ‘normality’, by which she seems variously to mean a life free of post-Soviet social dysfunction, a preference for John over men like Kolyvanov because John smiles at her, and now support for Sherlock because the internet said he helped people. It’s feeble-witted, and human, and probably to a degree reliable.

‘And you’re not afraid now?’ Sherlock inquires. He expects to be contemptuous, but instead he remembers Molly again. Why are women like that?

‘Of course I am afraid!’ Zoya retorts. ‘But you know Mama is ill, and I love her. With ten thousand dollars, we pay off most of the debts my husband made. I will not work for bandits but we must have money and I believe you can afford it.’

Sherlock considers. John is nodding vigorously and gesturing at him to say yes. Sherlock perceives this passively, because he has run out of self to spend on appearances and it is possible that he is about to collapse where he stands. A gestalt moment has occurred, pivoting their situation from hopelessness into possibility, and he cannot react to it.

Bile and humiliation. A dog would function better than this.

‘ _Nu_ – well?’ snaps Zoya. She is obviously nervous. John is pulling faces.

Sherlock tries. He considers the world, and the remains of himself, and he tries to feel, and there is nothing. He deduces instead, building atom by atom the fact that he is glad. Zoya will, maybe, save them. It is logical to be glad. For John’s sake, he is.

‘ _Bolshoe spasibo, Zoya Andreevna,_ ’ Sherlock says. He registers the sincerity in his own voice, and is surprised by it.

Then he breaks. His remaining channel to the world collapses in on itself. There is blindness, suffocation, and incorruptible awareness, as if his intellect was a camera recording after death. It is abstractly fascinating, like watching an elbow bend backwards. John did not let him die properly. Therefore, this.

Meanwhile Zoya’s eyes have widened in acknowledgement of Sherlock’s words. She inclines her head.

‘Without you, our chances are poor,’ Sherlock says. His voice curdles in his sealed head. It’s unbearable, it’s unremarkable. ‘I’ll transfer ten thousand to your account now and another ten after the job’s done. I want you properly motivated. Understand, however, I am...’ Sherlock gropes one last time for signifiers which could bridge the gulf. ‘Singularity,’ he says.

Zoya looks baffled.

‘He’s not really himself,’ John says. ‘We’re very grateful for your help, Zoya.’

Sherlock nods. John’s description is the direct opposite of the truth. Sherlock is utterly and only himself. Constructs shimmer and disintegrate. He records, he continues. Breath by unwanted breath by unwanted breath.

 

**John**

John feels dazed, as if they’d spent the night in hell but now there is hope again, which might not be so far from the truth.

After a few hours of sleep, Sherlock appears to be functioning. He’s walking around, and talking in a physically normal way, though his deductions are mixed with the occasional weirdness. When Zoya bustles off to her bag and comes back with three fat pastries she calls _pirozhki_ , instead of refusing one as usual, Sherlock plonks himself cross-legged under the window and starts munching away like a man who knows his doctor will force-feed him if he doesn’t.

With Sherlock apparently stable, John turns his attention to Zoya. He knew she wouldn’t betray them, and he wants to say so, but she seems to have moved on, and John senses that’s probably wise; they need to leave the heavy stuff alone for a while. Currently she’s wandering around the graffiti room, holding her lit phone up to the walls and translating the Cyrillic scribbles aloud. It turns out that some of it is indeed at the ‘so-and-so is a cunt’ level, but a lot of it is about political change: lyrics and even classic poetry by names John doesn’t recognise but which Zoya pronounces with reverence.

In spite of their situation, he’s is fascinated. He knows so little about Russia, and cultural hotspots have not been a feature of this trip. What kind of city has teenagers who scrawl poetry on the walls and fitness instructors who expound on it?

‘You wouldn’t get this in London,’ he says.

‘Well, Russians love ideals,’ Zoya tells him. ‘Sometimes in the past we don’t have much else. My generation does not have energy to try for political change again, but perhaps the teenagers do.’

‘Highly edifying,’ Sherlock puts in. ‘Zoya, do you have a plan to stop us being enslaved or murdered?’

John glances at Sherlock with both relief and irritation. The sarcasm in his voice suggests he’s coping... and is also bloody rude.

‘I was going to ask that myself,’ says John. ‘If you have useful information, we’re all ears.’

‘All right, let’s talk business,’ says Zoya, pocketing her phone. ‘You need me, not just my information. I won’t turn up to work today, and that is because you ambushed me. I am your hostage. You demand a meeting with Kolyvanov in a park on the way out of the city, or you will kill me. Phone him and say that. I will scream behind your voice.’

‘Logical, as far as it goes,’ says Sherlock. He gets up and stalks towards Zoya, focusing intensely on her, as he always does when reclassifying someone from idiot to usable resource. ‘You’re a valid bargaining chip to use on Gleb, I agree. Now explain why Kolyvanov cares if we kill you.’

‘He doesn’t care, of course not,’ Zoya retorts calmly. ‘But he must show he is a powerful man who protects the interests of employees. The bandits have codes, Mr Holmes, that is how things run and are not chaos. Also, Kolyvanov wants you working for him, not killed by Gleb. So he will come, even if it’s a risk.’ Zoya sighs. ‘Maybe because it is a risk. He is bored working at a desk, I think. So would I be. I believe he wants you to do his paperwork, true?’

‘He seems to want a sort of trophy secretary to free him from the adminis-trivia,’ says John. ‘Couldn’t he get a Russian one?’

‘Not one with my intellect,’ responds Sherlock. ‘And I’m a foreigner with no local power base, who can be blackmailed into reliability. No; Kolyvanov isn’t a favourite among Petersburg intellectuals, I think. He trades on a mixture of the bond between ex-soldiers, and just being the most vicious dog in the pack.’

‘Right, fine, so he has a weakness.’ John appeals to Zoya. ‘Are you sure Gleb doesn’t want to shoot him and take over? I doubt Kolyvanov Securities’ civilian staff would cry.’

Zoya shakes her head. ‘Too much risk. Gleb has no, let me say, right to take over.’

‘Yes, by doing that he’d open himself to being legitimately removed by the next man down,’ says Sherlock, his eyes gleaming. Either he’s somehow recovering or he’s gambling his last energy reserves. ‘But if we kill his boss for him, in front of a retinue, then the next thing...’

‘OK, I don’t want to seem ungrateful,’ interrupts John. ‘But if I shoot Kolyvanov in front of a bunch of minions, then the next thing is that we’re on the run as murderers. I doubt even Mycroft can fix that.’

‘Probably not,’ says Sherlock, steepling his fingers against his lips. ‘But I suspect there’s nothing to fix. Zoya?’

Zoya smiles grimly. ‘Gleb will claim responsibility and not leave it on you, yes. His niece helped you, and he looks foolish if he admits he did not expect that. Do you think I just scream and wait? I know how to take a gun from a man.’

‘No doubt,’ says Sherlock, starting to pace again. ‘Then we go back to England, everyone realises the Rich Brook affair was a set-up and Kolyvanov was involved, and suddenly Gleb’s a bandit hero. He removed a weak and incompetent leader who was under foreign control, and the last thing he’ll want is to share credit for that. No. If we pull this off, we’re free.’

Sherlock wheels around and looks John in the eye.

John nods and swallows. Hope is rising in his chest, the lightness and the pleasure of it so sudden that they unbalance him – and he’s smitten by the contrast between that feeling and the blankness of Sherlock’s expression. It suggests nothing but rote calculation.

But John can’t stop and attend to that. For just a few more hours Sherlock must endure running on empty. They have hope, and it’s time to prepare.

 

**John**

John and Zoya lean silently against the rental car, which is parked on a track in a half-wild city park. It’s gone eleven at night, and nobody’s around except a gang of teenagers John can hear in the middle distance. They’d better not come blundering over.

The choice of night is a calculated gamble. There’s certain to be plenty of bandits, and it will be harder for them to track Sherlock and John in their dark clothes. John has positioned himself and Zoya to take best advantage of the available light.

Snow is not currently falling, but a six-inch layer of it covers the open ground and heaps the branches of the nearby copse that they may use as basic cover when shooting begins. It’s a clear night, with illumination from the moon in addition to the city light haze reflecting off the snow, and there is nothing to do but wait and watch the distant stream of cars beyond the gardeners’ hut with a curious bumpy roof that Zoya declared would be a good landmark for a rendezvous, as it’s visible from the main road but not on it. They are in her hands now. John does not like that, but he also dislikes it surprisingly mildly. It is necessary. This is the final throw. His hand tightens on the grip of his pistol ten times a minute. An hour has passed, somehow. Very little has been said.

‘Have you found anything useful?’ John asks Sherlock, who has been minutely examining the apparently featureless snow of their environment.

Sherlock looks up, and his expression is as blank as it was when he snarled and blustered his way through the ‘hostage’ call to Kolyvanov. His aggression then was superlative acting, and John is pretty sure that his current scrutiny of twilit pebbles is equally a front.

‘Mm,’ Sherlock says vaguely, and moves out of conversation range.

OK. Sherlock’s reversion to mute suffering might break John’s heart, except it’s already in pieces, and he’s learnt how to keep going anyway. He’s so keyed up and exhausted that he only has feelings for the challenge in front of him. After that, they can rest.

Sherlock, of course, very possibly equates rest with death at the moment. Win-win situation, then, eh? Oh God, John is wishing for his army mates. They psyched themselves up for a thousand fights with gallows humour like that.

‘Will you marry him?’ Zoya says.

John jumps. ‘What?’

‘I read online, in England now homosexuals can marry each other,’ Zoya says, sounding a bit dubious but nothing worse. ‘Civil partnership.’

John rubs his face. Zoya has been very quiet. Her face is in shadow but he can tell she’s scared, which probably accounts for the digression. Her version of making death jokes.

‘I doubt it,’ John says. _Would he accept?_ flickers through his head and is buried. ‘Big ceremonies and bits of paper aren’t really us. Anyway, I thought you didn’t approve of gay people, let alone gay marriage.’

‘Things happen whether I approve them or not,’ says Zoya. ‘Sometimes I don’t know what I think and I have to work it out, like anybody.’ She points at Sherlock, and John has now been in Russia long enough to realise that this is not a polite gesture. ‘I do know that if I was married to him, I would beat him too. Though I would try to help him first.’

‘Yeah,’ says John. There was humour in the ‘beating’ comment, and if she doesn’t see how she’s being offensive, then what she does see isn’t entirely imaginary either. ‘Sherlock can be difficult. He...’ John pauses, and then goes on in a rush: ‘He’s suicidal. Last night I found him about to jump out of a window.’

Zoya nods, hikes her elbows onto the roof of the car and seems to think. She doesn’t look shocked, and John has some thoughts about inscrutable Russians that he recognises are probably as subtle as Zoya’s opinions on gay sadomasochism.

Then she says: ‘Mama feels bad that she’s ill and I have to look after her. That’s not fun. But we both know that when she dies I will find a different life and more people. With a man, it’s different. You have to decide if he hurts you so much that this is not worthwhile.’

‘It is worthwhile,’ protests John. It’s not right that Zoya’s talking about Sherlock hurting him when Sherlock is the one in trouble. ‘I mean, he’s not always like this, he’s brilliant, he’s...’ John trails off, caught between what he loves about Sherlock and the fear that Zoya will scoff at it.

‘Yes, for you I can see that is true, although I don’t absolutely understand. Maybe if I saw Sherlock when he is not ill, I would understand.’

‘No, he’s an arsehole when he’s well, too,’ says John, treacherously relieved at making the admission. ‘I just love him. He’s amazing, and maybe there’s a price for that. I don’t know.’ Stereotypes of mad genius are not John’s comfort zone, but he could hardly have avoided thinking about them, this past month. ‘I wish it didn’t work that way.’

‘People break,’ says Zoya. ‘The deal is not in being clever. I think you are both brave though.’ She nods towards Sherlock, who is sitting on a hummock now, looking ordinary and lost amid his layers of winter clothes. ‘To fight Moriarty and his people so far, and carry on even now. But I read much of this online and I don’t know what is lies. When all this is finished, tell me some of it?’

‘Yes,’ promises John, wondering what he’ll say, and how she’ll respond to it. Does she guess that Sherlock didn’t so much fight Moriarty as woo him, and they’re still dealing with the consequences?

‘ _John,_ ’ Zoya grips his arm.

Ahead of them, Sherlock is lurching to his feet. A series of one, two, three silvery black cars is peeling off from the main road and heading up the snowy track towards them. Their headlights fade as they halt in a clump and a dozen men in overcoats covering suits and tracksuits climb out and blur into a dark huddle, brandishing shotguns and rifles, the occasional ring glinting as someone points at the bumpy-roofed hut. One of them is Kolyvanov. Zoya hisses, and indicates a balding man with a mobile in his hand: ‘Gleb.’

It’s happening.

 

**Sherlock**

Sherlock is frozen over. The dreadful upswell that broke the ice of his depression has receded, and he is faintly but consistently aware of his own actions, as if manipulating a keyboard with numb fingers. Meaning does not reach him but there is a structure, a plan agreed with John, and he has programmed himself to complete it.

Sherlock draws his Makarov, checking his position against the tops of towerblocks that are just visible over the trees, and backing into the precise spot John chose, which gives him the advantage of the available light as well as access to easy cover. John and Zoya are in place, with his arm around her throat; they’ll act out a thug-with-hostage routine while Sherlock puts on a show of thwarted, egotistical pseudo-genius. Once all eyes are on Sherlock, John will shoot Kolyvanov. What happens next will probably be up to Gleb.

Sherlock waits. Zoya screams as pre-agreed, to ‘give away’ their location.

Ten seconds later, multiple firearms are pointing at Sherlock. Gleb and Kolyvanov have entered the area at the centre of two separate groups of what Zoya would call _localtsy_. These form half-circles around the bosses, rifles trained in the half-light as competently as if they were operating in summer sunshine. Sherlock observes them as best he can in the twilight, the sheer mass of human data impacting on his damaged attention. One of them has a distorted skull, another is missing two fingers, and a third has a mass of scars as if a bullet had taken off his cheek flesh. Not normal, as Zoya might say... but in reality normal enough for men of a certain stratum. These are veterans of conflict in the Russian ‘near abroad’, loyal to money but more to the _afganets_ who’s been through the same hell as they have.

Kolyvanov himself stops twenty yards from Sherlock and stands with his arms crossed, looking out of his human defence wall. The glint of his eyes in the moonlight gives him as fierce an expression as he had in the Vyborgskiy Bar. A stain pattern that shows dark against his overcoat speaks of negotiation with city authorities, while the mottled bruise on his chin can only have come from boxing to keep in shape. Whatever haunts him, he long since cauterised himself functional. Sherlock could respect that, if respect had meaning.

Watching the Russians take position, it occurs to Sherlock that if they succeed then his fight will truly be over, the way he has dreamt of since Bart’s. The thought is freefall.

‘OK, what is the problem with you?’ Kolyvanov breaks the silence of the stand-off, sounding genuinely interested. ‘Yes I threaten you, but if you just accept, you have a good life.’

Sherlock’s body is crawling with fear, demanding he run. The dark topmost windows of the towerblock behind Kolyvanov are staring like eyes, and he is aware almost routinely that, if fired from their current positions, _localtsy_ bullets will perforate his brain, throat, heart and liver. Kolyvanov’s will burst his eye. The thought is soothing – and that indulgence is impermissible, because guns are also pointed at John. Trusting Sherlock brings John to this pass, and if Sherlock could trade his life for John’s safety he would. But that is not their plan. He must remember it.

‘Shut up! She told us everything, Kolyvanov. Every naughty thing you’ve ever done, it’s all on here, and my brother in London has it too.’

Sherlock is shouting his lines. He observes a couple of teenage boys and a girl emerging from the trees behind the bandits; they break and run as gun barrels swivel towards them. If this was London, one of them would call the police... Well, it isn’t. Sherlock cannot guess what will happen.

Trying to keep his gun steady, with his other hand he holds up his mobile and a printout. ‘If you kill us – well, don’t think Mycroft’s naïve enough to simply send it to the authorities. But Ruslan Alkhanov? Magomed Aushev? How much do you think they would pay to know every pie you have your finger in? And what would they do with the information?’

It’s a bluff. But the claim that Zoya is a leak is enough to get Kolyvanov briefly side-eying Gleb. Some of the _localtsy_ glance towards him as well. For a second Sherlock hopes John has a window to fire at Kolyvanov, but when he glances around John is fully occupied with bandits who are trying to outflank him. Sherlock realises, in lucid despair, that it was of course vanity to think that John would eliminate the sniper assigned to him. The world is not made of patterns like that.

‘Anyone tries to get round behind us and I shoot her!’ John shouts, and movement stops.

‘OK, stalemate,’ says Kolyvanov, turning his attention back to Sherlock. ‘One problem, however. If you have such good information as you say then are you not able to leave and threaten me from London?’

Kolyvanov is sharper than they expected. Sherlock does not particularly care, because a new plan is forming: to simply get close enough to shoot and be shot by the Russian. That leaves John and Zoya out of this broken equation altogether. But Sherlock, with his feeble marksmanship, needs to get closer in, so he tries a prepared distraction, pressing a button on his mobile so that all the bandits’ phones go off, lights glowing through the fabric of their pockets like fireflies.

Although they barely react, it wins Sherlock a split second of surprise, which he uses to take several paces forwards without being shot. He is almost within the black and silver semicircle of bandits now, close enough to hit his target. _I want to die_ fills all of him, an unthinking pulse. John wants him to die as well; he knows that, or is too exhausted to un-know it.

‘This is your confession, Kolyvanov,’ he says, waving the printout, for John’s sake. John must not know this was suicide. ‘You’re going to sign it. Then, if you don’t tell anyone about Graf and Zagami, I don’t do anything with my insurance document here. Or with my hostage. We’ll dump her on our way out of town.’

Kolyvanov looks unimpressed. ‘You would have been smarter to run away. I can’t work out what you’re doing, and I don’t tolerate that. So we kill you now unless you put down your gun.’

 _Now_ , thinks Sherlock to himself. He’s sighting on Kolyvanov’s forehead, and he expects to fire. It seems odd that this hasn’t already happened. It should have... it doesn’t... the dark windows behind the Russian seem so close, as if the city itself was standing in judgement... and as another second ticks by the knowledge forms that Sherlock cannot shoot. Graf was his once and only kill, a mania-fuelled perversion.

The only needful thing is his own death. He cannot change that any more than he could change falling, although John tried. Sherlock’s skull is a vice of acid, and he is poisonous to touch, and if John were here he would end him in mercy, but Sherlock no longer has John, he only has the last of the snipers.

 _I’m sorry_ , Sherlock thinks vaguely, at no one.

‘Kolyvanov – just fucking shoot me!’ he shouts, dropping his gun, and holding his arms out. ‘Please!’

In front of Sherlock is a Russian, ex-military, slightly built, with fine, dark hair, and in the moonlight his expression is clearly one of surprise tinged perhaps with compassion. He steps forwards as if to investigate something, and his face is that of a man who has both endured and mastered. Sherlock shrinks from it, turning away to withhold his own taint as the last dignity he can manage... and sees, stark against the snowfield, two more small figures.

Zoya dives away from John, and in one graceful motion he sights, aims and fires.

Shouting breaks out all around them. As his body takes over from his drowning mind, Sherlock drops and rolls, knowing that Oleg Kolyvanov is dead.

 

**John**

Shots whistle overhead as John hits the ground. The _localtsy_ are firing at him... too late to protect their boss, he’s fiercely sure of that.

Zoya threw herself forwards when he gave the sign. Now in a blur he sees her roll and bounce up right in front of Gleb, confused bandits making way for her. She barks something at her uncle in Russian and he raises his hand and shouts, causing the men around him to cease their fire, which was already ragged.

Off to the side, Sherlock is sitting in the moonlit snow with a few _localtsy_ guns trained on him. Most of them seem more interested in making sure that the large hole in Kolyvanov’s neck is as fatal as it looks, however. When one of them uncertainly redirects his weapon towards John, Zoya kicks it out of his hand.

They have won, John realises. Gleb is acting as Zoya said he would, visibly assuming command. Zoya herself looks disturbingly at home, if not exactly happy. They have won.

John himself is feeling a little out-of-it... This may be due to the fact that when he touches his thigh his hand comes away wet. Oops.

But they’re safe. Sherlock is safe. Sherlock is safe. _Just fucking shoot me_ , echoes in John’s head but no, no, he’s not going to take that on board, he’s just not, not now, not when he’s finally... anyway, it was Sherlock acting weirdly that distracted Kolyvanov, and John is finally... Hell, the wound on his thigh is basically superficial, but he’s lightheaded.

John lurches to his feet. His leg supports him, just about. All he wants to do is collect Sherlock and get back to the city centre and sleep – probably in a hotel room. Going back to Zoya’s would be too dangerous, in case any Kolyvanov loyalists do decide on revenge.

‘Sherlock, let’s get out of here,’ he says, his voice a bit croaky. ‘We’re done. We did it.’

Sherlock nods mechanically and gets up. His expression is vacant, which is probably down to shock and certainly to exhaustion. It doesn’t matter now. John will fix it. John has killed. John has killed for Sherlock again, and Sherlock _belongs_ to him, and John will protect him, after some sleep.

‘Zoya!’ John demands, more curtly than he means to. ‘Can you drive us back? I don’t think either of us are fit for it.’

Zoya looks around. Her face seems to have set into a different shape since she started talking to her uncle, and John realises, with a qualm that briefly overtops his shock, just how vulnerable they still are. But she finishes with Gleb and comes over to him.

‘Yes,’ she says, quietly. ‘You are lucky; my uncle sees things your way. Kolyvanov Securities is no longer interested in you if you agree, so to say, to move out of local affairs. But I don’t think all these men are your friends. I will take you away from here now.’

‘Right,’ says John, back in practical mode. They owe Zoya money, which still guarantees her loyalty. He suspects there’s plenty she’s not telling them about the opinions of the bandits, however, and they are taking more and more of an interest in Sherlock, who is standing passive and apparently unseeing in their midst.

‘Come on,’ says John, going over to him and taking him by the arm. Unease is tickling at the back of his mind but there is no time for it, they just have to get clear.

Which they do. The rental car has had one of its back windows shot out, which means Sherlock has to sit alone on the side of the seat without glass shards embedded in it while John goes up front with Zoya, but they make it down the track, and out of the park, and then they are on one of the wide, potholed trunk roads leading back into the heart of the city.

John lets out a long, slow breath. He’s watching Sherlock in the rear view mirror and Sherlock appears to be watching nothing, but John is not going to panic; one thing at a time. He thinks of a bath, and a bed in a warm room. Now the fight is over, if necessary he will just bloody well hold Sherlock in his arms until some lights come on in that incomprehensible brain. Moriarty’s snipers are dead. They have time again.

John is wondering whether Zoya thinks she’s taking them back to her place, and if so whether he has the energy to object, when she speaks, the first of them to do so since they left the park

‘Well, I don’t do that every day!’ she says. She sounds like their earnest, slightly worried landlady again, which he has to like.

‘I try not to make it a habit myself,’ John agrees, aware that blood from his leg is soaking into the seat. ‘What can you do, though? People will take against Sherlock. Hope, Zagami, Tabone, and now some barmy _afganets_...’

He lets his voice trail off. He hates the bravado in it – for fuck’s sake, where did that come from? He _is_ a barmy _afganets_. That’s a parallel he’s simply left alone, because there’s nothing useful he can do with it. And now Kolyvanov is dead. John killed him. John will deal with that like he always does. Posturing won’t help.

He wishes Sherlock could help. The wish makes him feel exposed. And selfish.

Zoya has stopped at overhead lights. She is just pulling away again when Sherlock opens his door and steps out of the moving car.

John is frozen for a full second, unable to process what just happened. Zoya turns around wildly to look until a blast of horns and squeal of brakes forces her to go back to driving. John jerks open his door and has to slam it shut a second before it’s smashed off by a lorry. It’s half a minute before Zoya fights her way to a spot on the road where John won’t be killed if he gets out; and when he makes it onto the snowy pavement he tries to run and of course he falls over, because there is a fucking great bloody hole in his thigh.

‘Shit!’ snarls John, scrabbling back upright by holding onto the bonnet. ‘Go after him!’

‘Where?’ demands Zoya. ‘I didn’t see! Dark!’

They are on a poorly-lit stretch of icy pavement with multiple courtyards and alleys leading off it. A few pedestrians stare at them.

They search for half an hour. They don’t find Sherlock.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock have won their battle. All three snipers are dead. But Sherlock has overshot his strength. Suicidal and despairing, he disappears into the frozen city, leaving John with little hope of finding him alive.

**Sherlock**

St Petersburg is a vast white darkness, and Sherlock drifts through it like a blackened ghost.

The snow is falling fast, lying deep and still in patches between the occasional streetlight. He sees gateways, and sodden incomprehensible posters, and between them glimpses of cosy, ramshackle kitchens or a sprawl of toys beyond glass. These are the boxes where people live, with warmth and language and hands.

Sherlock is cocooned from those things. He is cocooned from John, who kills unerringly and cleanly, for justice and reason and love. In wanting to die, Sherlock sucks life away and poisons it, so he is amputating himself from John, to be alone where he will simply cease to pretend.

He switches off his phone, and checks a map on the side of a kiosk. He recognises that he is making his way to the Metro. As if underground he would be contained.

From a vaulted marble entrance, Sherlock descends a vast escalator. Everything around him _is_ , and the pain strikes him, and he does not move, carried downwards. John despises him. He is hunted by men with guns. If those things have passed, they have not passed from him. They took root in the poison, are truer than he is.

At the bottom, he gets on a train. What else, in a station?

 

**John**

In a run-down side street, John is sitting in the back of the car with his injured leg sticking out into the air. Zoya has brought supplies from a late-night chemist, and he’s cleaned his wound and patched it up. Now he’s gritting his teeth while she bandages it. 

The laptop GPS page sits on the seat beside him, silent. Sherlock has walked away from him. When he does that, John follows, always. For as long as he can.

John cannot follow if Sherlock has vanished into his own head.

They were supposed to have won. Happy ever after. Instead it feels like only Zoya’s bustling presence is keeping John from physical collapse. Maybe he should collapse, and he’d wake up with Sherlock beside him, real again. No, he has to go on looking – as if he even knows how. Zoya has already spread-emailed all her friends in Piter, plus various outfits she refuses to name, and what can he do more useful than that?

 _I wanted to save him. Tell me I tried._ But he can’t quite get those words into his mouth.

‘You really don’t like him, do you?’ he says as Zoya winds a bandage around his thigh.

She’s silent for a moment. ‘No, as you ask me. Perhaps I should not say this if he is dead, but even so. I read the articles about him and I understand that people admire him, but he is mad and he is hurting the person who loves him.’

John searches for his reaction to that. He isn’t offended; he likes that she’s direct.

‘He loves me too,’ John says. There’s no doubt of it. All the horror has given him that much. ‘That goes a long way.’

In spite of everything, he feels like he doesn’t want her to judge him. But she doesn’t reply at first, and John stares past her tousled head with its dusting of snow, down the quiet street into darkness. He remembers Sherlock mad and raging, Sherlock dead on the pavement, Sherlock weeping on the floor of a Valletta house, their foreheads together. They promised to fight, and their enemies are dead now. What’s left of _them_?

‘Sometimes an arrogant man loves one other person,’ Zoya says, jarring John painfully as she slices off the bandage with his penknife. ‘To everyone else he is an arsehole, and yet he adores the one person. You believe that the situation is permanent.’

John pauses, looking down at the dirty snow between his feet. He understands that Zoya is talking about her ex-husband, and that the analogy is valid for himself. He is sure of Sherlock’s love, but even if he comes back and lithium or some other drug reprieves them, can any normal emotion survive this?

‘Well, I have to make it permanent,’ he says. ‘I will find him.’ One last try. Bring Sherlock back and somehow keep him safe. ‘I wish I could find people like he can, Zoya. God, you don’t know who he really is, in London. When he’s him.’ John stops; he cannot bear it. And it helps nothing. ‘Drunks freeze to death here, don’t they?’

‘Sometimes at night it happens,’ says Zoya. ‘But Sherlock looks foreign so people might help, if he does not hide. John, what are you going to do? I will go home in case he comes there, yes, but you? Is it really worth to stay out?’

‘Yes. I’ll drive around. My leg’s fine now,’ he lies. ‘I’ll look at everyone I pass. I’ll talk to the police. I know you don’t trust them but I’ll pull a dumb foreigner act. I’ll say Sherlock’s a mental patient in my professional charge, which is practically the truth.’

Zoya doesn’t look convinced. John gently but firmly pushes her aside and stands on his leg. It’s less painful now – everything’s relative.

‘OK?’ he says

Zoya demurs. She evidently agrees he should risk going – if he doesn’t find Sherlock she might not get paid, which is surely focusing her mind. But John also suspects that she cares, and that therefore she guesses he simply can’t _not_ go.

Before Zoya can suggest that she should go and he should stay at her flat, John gets into the driver’s seat, squeezes her hand through the open door and drives away.

 

**Sherlock**

The crowds are thin down here late on a Monday evening. Scattered passengers are reading or listening to music. Some teenagers laugh and huddle together.

It’s not quite the London tube, though. There are projecting seats, less advertising, wider carriages. The people have furry coats and serious snowboots.

Sherlock grips a metal pole as the train rattles and sways. He doesn’t think, or rather thought is a half-conscious slew of charnel and regret. He has killed, and John has killed for him, and Sherlock sealed himself away so he wouldn’t care. He was better like that. Then he fell. They are safe now, except that Sherlock fell. He can go no lower than this – _Please shoot me._ It is possible that he repeats that aloud. People move away.

He travels aimlessly on different lines for an hour. There is nowhere to go; train wheels and electric rails present themselves, and death is here, and he cannot reach for it. He cannot reach.

He gets out onto a colonnaded platform dripping with gilt and lined with chandeliers. The ornamentation is threat and jangle and void. 

Sherlock’s thoughts skid like worn cogs. He itches. A train arrives, blue-ridge-sided and boxy, with dirt patterns that show it was last cleaned on Thursday. He gets in. ‘ _Ostrorozhno, dveri zakrivayutsa!_ ’ the tannoy bellows; from the timing that must mean ‘Careful, the doors are closing.’ 

The miniscule deduction feels odd and solid in his mind

The train moves. The train accelerates.

He thinks of John.

The carriage lights flicker and Sherlock is almost thrown off his feet as the train lurches. At the same time, a fluid shock rips through him. Existence is gathering heft and texture, the weight and implication of _John_ bearing through him, shot with sweetness and horror. He shakes his head as if ridding his ears of water but the new density of sensation does not clear. What is this?

Sherlock has hurt John, frightened him, left him. Yes. There is a price for that. He clutches his skull in his hands and screams because it hits him with the force of a door swinging back that John is dead. He died in the snow with his throat shot out. Sherlock loved him, and the outcome is this.

 _No_. Of course that didn’t happen. But the image bores into his brain and nests there regardless. Sensation is returning to his mind as if after frostbite. People are staring, and there is no hope, and if Sherlock accepts that will he be allowed relief? He moans. John would not deny him relief, because John is kind. Death is relief. John is kind, and that knowledge is a knife to his beaten brain. People are staring. Sherlock will die under a train.

John is _not_ dead. There is still time. Sherlock can go back to him.

That thought is true, and Sherlock will fight for it. Seconds pass, and he is clenched with rage because he will fight for it and lose. The wave of despair is incoming – _John is dead must be dead_ – and it breaks over him – _John despises you deserve to die_ – and it rushes onwards.

It has not dragged him under.

Sherlock blinks. He arches his neck, and it feels like raising his head into breathable air. What is this?

Lithium?

Sherlock breathes. He doesn’t dare to move or to try a real thought, but forgotten instincts stir and report. Lithium might feel like a muffling of horror, John said, the websites said. A clearing of space in the mind. This. New roots are snaking down into him, and they curl around facts that are not tumbling and jagged but fixed like rocks in a torrent: John is alive, John came for him, he remembers who he is. How he fell. Who caught him.

Sherlock sits in the zone of empty seats that surrounds him, and poison begins to drain from his mind. He is exhausted and hungry and chilled and afraid, but here is clarity, and each moment it endures is consolidation. John did not tell him about _this_ , the calm and the bare revelation... or maybe he did, and Sherlock did not understand. For so long he’d forgotten such things.

Peace. All around, regular mechanical clicks and the susurrus of the train’s passage. People coughing, minutely shifting their boots. The business of the world, smoothly interconnected. The man sitting nearest to Sherlock is a barber. The woman standing by the door lives above a baker’s; her daughter sitting nearby has had three abortions. Facts, in order. Time, in sequence. Time in which to act.

The train is emerging onto an above-ground stretch of track near a terminus. Sherlock has two options now: travel to the end of the line, get out and freeze, or take the last train back to John.

He switches his phone on and texts: ‘30 mins. Meet me by the gates at Admiralteyskaya station.’

 

**John**

There’s blood seeping through John’s bandage, and his face feels hot. It’s the only part of him that does.

He’s been out for half an hour, and he’s driving around near the south bank of the Neva, scanning the few faces that pass. He headed this way because rivers attract suicides, and only when he arrived did he remember that the water is entirely frozen, a weird landscape of merengue-puff billows stretching out under the grey-orange glow of the city night.

He can’t help but see that it’s beautiful. He wants Sherlock here, the old Sherlock, so he can refuse to care that it’s beautiful and John can harangue him. But old Sherlock has been gone for a while now, and John’s not doing so well either. His vision keeps blurring, turning faces and snow and palace-fronts alike into a pastel haze. He’s decided against talking to any policemen in case they try to arrest him for drunk driving.

Fever. Hardly a surprise after the last few days. He thought they were saved, then the backlash... John is at the end of his strength. He feels like he’s hitting a soft wall inside his own head. His leg throbs relentlessly. A familiar, confident voice in his head instructs him to _analyse! Think!_

He tries, but there’s nothing to go on. He’s not Sherlock. Exhaustion and grief and anger blur in his mind, and he keeps driving, and he knows what this really is: a vigil. In his time John has heard both ‘Please God let me live,’ and ‘Please God let me die,’ and for all that he believes in life, he couldn’t ask anyone to bear indefinitely what he saw Sherlock endure last night. John would try drug after drug and exhaust his own energy fighting, but he can’t force life on Sherlock unwanted.

But if Sherlock dies somewhere on the frozen streets, it will happen while John is out here too, searching. Sherlock must know John loves him. If he dies, let him die knowing that. _Please._

‘Just – that!’ John demands of the empty air. He’s crying inside the bubble of the car, pleading with an indifferent universe. He feels increasingly light-headed, as if a huge, woozy space were opening up inside his skull, and he forces himself to concentrate on the passersby, but the world is starting to distort... he almost swerves into a lamppost when a man on a huge black horse looms out of the snow to the right of the car. It’s just a statue, and John gets a grip before he drives up the pavement. But lamplight is strobing across his eyes and his hand lurches down and bashes into the gearstick instead of grasping it smoothly. Horns blare and pedestrians shout.

He is abruptly, clear-headedly aware that he needs to stop driving right now. He’s endangering people who have nothing to do with his personal drama.

There is a bleep – a text message. John lets the sound echo in his muzzy head as he carefully pulls over. He daren’t hope it’s Sherlock, but just maybe it’s Zoya with a lead?

 

**Sherlock**

As Sherlock steps off the train, he thinks of the electrified rail inches from his feet. An impulse murmurs _Die, you arrogant prick_ , and he can feel John’s contempt for him, anticipate the relief of surrendering to it, stepping off the platform, touching his hand to...

No. That isn’t how he thinks now, or it isn’t the whole story. If he’s not quite sane, then he is in control of emotions which fester and surge but don’t spill over. He can’t be sure the vortex won’t open under him again, but the world has settled for the present.

Sherlock rides the lamplit escalator towards it.

Thanks to a slow-moving train it’s 47 minutes since he sent his text message. John will be waiting, as Admiralteyskaya is near Zoya’s flat. John _has_ to be waiting, because what will Sherlock do otherwise?

He will manage just fine, of course, because he always has. With his mind back online, there’s no reason to panic. But he has not been himself, and suddenly he is again, and he doesn’t want to analyse that, he just wants John’s eyes and John’s smell, and the feel of John’s arms...

John is not in the atrium. Occasional Russians plod past, heads mostly down. 

Sherlock’s phone has no new messages.

The lithium, if that’s what it is, won’t let Sherlock panic, but pleas seep into his mouth: _I’m sorry I hurt you, I’ll do better, just come back._ There’s no-one here to plead with though, and an old part of his mind supplies a relevant truth: all his life he drove away friends. He long since accepted that... Just not John. Don’t take John. _Please._

Sherlock walks out onto the covered steps. He’s not a child, to need to be met at the station, and he thinks of a business hotel he saw near Nevsky, which looked like it would ask no questions of midnight arrivals. The late thrum of the city surrounds him, and the snow is white and above the tall buildings the sky is soft grey-black. Everything is itself again. 

Somewhere, London and its crime scenes are waiting. Does John miss crime scenes? Something is shrivelling inside Sherlock. Whatever he shed down there in the tunnels, it was not supposed to be John. Sherlock can deduce the world down to atoms, but if he cannot –

John stumbles around a pillar at the other end of the steps.

Sherlock blinks. His reactions may be constrained, but they’re not erased. His heart flares in his chest, and then he’s trying to run diagonally down the steps, almost tripping. He cries out ‘You’re hurt!’ How _could_ he have forgotten? 

There’s blood on John’s trousers and he’s limping. His face seems grey, with flushed cheeks. The initial look he turns towards Sherlock is blank exhaustion. Then John focuses with a visible effort – and abruptly half-collapses onto the steps. 

‘Oh, thank God,’ he says weakly, and wipes at his eyes. ‘Sorry... shit. All right. Have you hurt yourself? Did you...’

‘No. Forget that!’ interrupts Sherlock. He crouches down beside John, whose gloveless hand is hot to the touch. ‘You’re running a fever.’

‘You think?’ mutters John, with a ghost of his old dry wit. Then he makes an effort to focus on Sherlock and says cautiously, ‘You’re smiling at me. Has something changed?’

Sherlock hesitates. If he talks about what’s happened, he’s afraid it might evaporate, but the mixture of hope and dread in John’s face is so vivid that Sherlock can’t bring himself to stonewall it. ‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘About an hour ago. It’s like there’s space in my head and I can stand there. I think it – is it the lithium, John? Is it going to last?’

Instead of replying, John hisses in pain and clutches his leg. Sherlock is suddenly burning for confirmation of his hopes, but he has to wait, holding John’s shoulder and silently swearing that if he’s really got his mind back, he will somehow be a better friend. Neither of them want or need an easy life, but this? 

John looks at him and raises a wobbly hand, as if to say _Just give me a moment._ Sherlock kisses the proffered fingertips.

‘I can see the difference,’ says John when he’s settled himself. ‘You’re reacting to me. No more of that appalling, sealed-off... Well, fuck that, but you know what I mean. My money’s on lithium, yes. If it’s kicked in... there’s no guarantees, Sherlock, but generally if the stuff works, it works.’ John is starting to shiver. ‘Um, can I give you chapter and verse a bit later?’ 

‘Of course. I spotted a hotel near here,’ says Sherlock quickly. Actually he’d prefer it if bipolar were never mentioned again. He wants London and crime scenes and Baker Street and a healthy John beside him. What matters now is getting there. He stands up and takes  
John’s wrists. ‘We can get a room and call Zoya to get you a doctor.’

‘I am a doctor,’ John protests. He struggles to his feet, then groans in pain and slumps against the pillar, half-supported by Sherlock. ‘OK,’ he grunts.

Sherlock hooks his arm around John’s waist and manoeuvres him out onto the icy pavement. John is obviously at the limit of his endurance. Sherlock is scared by that but mostly it makes him focus. He _can_ focus, and that is a joy, even through the new, slightly waterlogged sensation of lithium regulating his brain.

The world extends around him, flat and stable. There are possibilities again. Connections. Even new limitations, which he will override. But first, John and rest.

‘Sherlock...’ mutters John, sounding more than half out-of-it.

‘Lean on me,’ Sherlock urges.

John does.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock have survived the snipers, and Sherlock’s bipolar is under control. But has that come at the cost of their relationship?

**John**

They spend a week at the hotel. Both of them want to get back to London, but John knows he probably shouldn’t fly immediately. When Sherlock insists he shouldn’t, John accepts it.

Aside from the state of his leg, which is healing well, he’s exhausted even after sleeping for two days solid and waking to find himself clean and patched up. They spend their time keeping a low profile, as Sherlock is not going public until they get home. That way, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade won’t find out from the media, plus when the story does break John and Sherlock will be on hand to exercise some kind of influence.

Meanwhile, Sherlock obsessively googles London news, and lays email plans with Mycroft, the one person who has been warned of his imminent resurrection. To make that revelatory phone call, Sherlock went out alone. John saw him off, anxious, knowing that Sherlock’s remaining family is one area in which he should not interfere. When Sherlock came back, even paler than usual, he just said, ‘Yes, that went all right. Is your leg better today?’ And the weird part of it was, that wasn’t (entirely) a distraction tactic. 

Sherlock is truly being attentive.

Well. John's the one familiar thing in the altered landscape of Sherlock’s mind, so of course Sherlock clings to him. And the sight of Sherlock laughing, then animated and intent as he deduces the criminal proclivities of the three youths who habitually hang around in the hotel atrium, is a marvel. Just once John interrupts him skimming through British Islamist forums on his laptop, to ask, ‘The lithium, Sherlock. I think I can see the answer, but reassure me: is it still working?’

Sherlock stops mid-flow and looks at John with his mouth open. He closes it very deliberately, then nods.

 _Thank God._ A knot in John’s stomach, already loose, dissolves. ‘Good stuff. Let’s go home, then.’

And they will; tickets are booked for tomorrow night. But that isn’t what’s on John’s mind right now. 

Every night here they’ve slept together in the literal sense – hearing ‘We have only double room, is OK?’ and almost being amused is John’s one clear memory of checking in to this hotel. When John occasionally hugs him Sherlock accepts it, and they kiss now and then. John wasn’t up to any more, of course. To start with.

Now... well, half an hour ago John got out Sherlock’s set of leather cuffs, which have survived all their adventures, and set them prominently on the bed. Sherlock, sitting cross-legged on the desk, ignored them and carried on reading about EDL splinter groups on his laptop. John went down to the atrium to arrange checkout, and now he’s come back and the cuffs and Sherlock are still in position.

Low libido is a lithium side effect, John tells himself. Hyper-sexuality is a symptom of mania. A ‘normal’ Sherlock was satisfied with a sex life that consisted of text-flirting with the Adler female. It makes sense. And it’s fine, of course. Fucking fine. 

It’s not fine. John is not superhuman.

‘Sherlock!’ he snaps. Forget how much this is going to hurt, he needs to know. 

Sherlock does, finally, look up from his screen. As ever, he is harrowingly beautiful. He’s dyed his hair black again, and even put on a tiny bit of weight. Dear God, this past week he’s actually been _eating_ to please John, so surely... 

‘You could force me,’ Sherlock suggests.

OK. At least that was better than _leave me alone_. John takes a deep breath. ‘No, I couldn’t,’ he replies. ‘We haven’t played for weeks. Assuming consent would not be smart.’

Sherlock gets down from his perch, and sits on the bed. For once in his life he seems to be at a loss without quite being distressed. John watches, remembering how he used to worry about what might underlie Sherlock’s blend of oddness and genius. Now he knows, and it doesn’t supply enough answers.

‘There’s a cotton-wool ceiling in my brain,’ says Sherlock, staring at the curtained window. ‘It... softens me.’

Ah. John kicks himself. He’s been monitoring the physical side effects of lithium, basically because he can. But it’s the other ones that bother Sherlock.

John sits beside him.

‘That’s normal,’ he says. ‘It’s better than depression.’

‘Did I say it wasn’t?’ Sherlock snaps, though less viciously than he might once have done, and that’s both a relief and unsettling. ‘To be precise it’s preferable to being unable to think and constantly wanting to kill myself. I might select mild depression over...’ he gestures vaguely with his hands on either side of his head. ‘John, I’m still me, but nothing quite _matters_ enough.’

John sighs. ‘I’d be lying if I said I had a quick fix for that. You might gradually adjust to the lithium. Or when you’ve been stable for a few weeks, we can try you on a lower dose, maybe.’

‘Hm.’ Sherlock’s voice is low and quiet. ‘I might enjoy a scene if we got started, but I’m not crawling out of my skin for it. This is better than suicide but I wish I could... want things again. I can try, John, if it’s important.’

John is silent. It is bloody important, to him, but if he says that he might end up topping a man who’s faking consent. He takes one of Sherlock’s hands and strokes it, aware that for once in their life together he’s being the impatient one, while Sherlock needs space. Maybe he’ll come out of this once he’s adjusted to being stable.

Another possibility is that this a chronic side effect, and part of Sherlock – part of their relationship – is obliterated by the very drug that keeps him sane. There’s no way to find out, except by waiting. 

‘No,’ John says. ‘You’ll do more harm than good if you push it. I’ll be here when you want me.’ 

He buttons himself shut around the empty place inside.

 

**Sherlock**

On their final day in St Petersburg they have a farewell lunch with Zoya at an Ukranian restaurant in a quiet backstreet. Sherlock doesn’t really see the point, but her friendship with John oddly intriguing, so he listens as she tells John, with a moue of distaste, about some mysterious ‘food poisoning’ deaths among senior management at Kolyvanov Securities, then expands excitedly on her plans to improve the state of her flat, as now Sherlock has paid her in full she’s discharged her debts and has a few thousand dollars left. A friend of a friend installs kitchens and is getting her a discount.

Sherlock hunches in his rustic-style chair, eating mushroom _blini_ because John glares pointedly at him whenever he stops. He feels slightly hazy – lithium does this to him – so he forbears to comment on the inanities streaming by. What annoys him enough to pay attention is John’s reaction. He’s not just being polite, he actually thinks Zoya’s priorities are admirable. In between scoffing his _pierog_ , he starts telling her about their plans for handling the British press, talking as if their lives were the silly ones, not hers.

Sherlock lays down his fork with a click, and sighs. He means the others to pay attention, and they do: Zoya pauses mid-chomp and John gives a start. 

‘A few thousand dollars for new plumbing and she’s ecstatic,’ Sherlock says. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’ve the brains to manipulate that clod Gleb if you wanted. How can you bear to live such a tiny little life?’

He’s genuinely curious. Also he wonders if she will say: _You’re normal too, now, on lithium, stupid and numb and content._

Instead, she fires back, ‘How can you bear to be a gay freak? All this killing, all John does for you, it’s because you make enormous mess and he has to help. You want excitement? Have it, but see who has to pay.’

Sherlock relaxes a little. Beside him, John loyally protests that she’s being unfair, but Sherlock ignores him. This is why Sherlock respects Zoya, in the end. She dislikes him for genuine reasons rather than from cowardice. She sees him, and he is himself.

He picks up his fork again and spears pancake on it. ‘Zoya, I discovered as a child that I have to be what I am. Whatever follows, follows. I expected permanent solitude. I was surprised when...’ He waves at John, who is watching open-mouthed.

‘And I have to care for Mama,’ Zoya says, returning to her pickle. ‘If a person has to fight hard for his “little life” and also for another person’s, he appreciates it, doesn’t he?’

‘Perhaps.’ Sherlock does not in fact wish to talk about that. He’s annoyed to see it makes Zoya look knowing anyway.

‘What are _you_ living for, John Watson?’ she asks.

‘Oh. I don’t know,’ says John, obviously taken aback by the question. He glances towards Sherlock.

At that, Zoya laughs - genuine laughter, that rises over the clink and chatter of the restaurant. John flushes slightly, realising what he’s implied, then laughs as well. 

Sherlock sits eating his _blini_ , pretending aloofness as Zoya needles John about blushing maidens in love. John can handle that. Sherlock is trying to handle the feeling of something unclenching inside him, spreading and thinning the lithium haze. Preliminary analysis suggests that it may be pleasure.

They walk back to the hotel in the brief afternoon. Although John temporarily has a cane again, they’re more confident on the icy pavements these days. Several times, Sherlock steadies John in the awkward spots and then finally holds his hand as they walk down a quiet alley. John looks up at him with slight surprise but says nothing. 

They both fix their eyes on the brightness of facades battling to emerge between the heaping drifts, hanging icicles and leaden sky. He is starting to become interested in this northern river city, which is in some respects a twin of London, but he’s leaving after the barest acquaintance. Once they get home, it may feel like he never left. 

He remembers blood on the pavement, fire in the sky and death in the snow. Those things happened, but lithium blurs the memory of pain, and that loss he cannot bring himself to grieve.

For now, he’s here with John beside him, their exhalations mingling in the air. 

 

**Sherlock**

‘There’s no need to pack yet,’ says John, when they get back to the hotel. ‘We got late flights to reduce the chance of you being recognised at Heathrow.’

‘Yes,’ says Sherlock. He knows all that.

‘So I’m going to rest,’ says John, and lies down on the bed.

Five minutes later he jumps up again, says, ‘OK, I’m having a shower,’ and starts to undress. 

Sherlock watches from his position at the wardrobe, where he’s been considering the most anonymous clothes for their return trip. Is John dropping hints? The ploy is crassly obvious. Sherlock flicks through shirts with feigned attention, observing John in the mirrored wardrobe door. Naked, he frowns purposefully at the air in front of him, then strolls into the bathroom. He leaves the door ajar.

Sherlock lowers his hands from the hangers, then raises them again. There’s an odd scratchiness in his chest, a feeling like scrabbling for something and not getting purchase. For a week his mind’s eye has simply slipped out of focus whenever he considered sex. But Zoya jolted him. _All John does for you_ , she said. They do things for each other, he had thought.

John would ask, does Sherlock want sex? 

But how would he _know_? He’s used to either being driven by his desires, or finding them all extinguished. Sorting his impulses, weighing them, deciding which to act on is a paltry use for his intellect, which should be attending to higher business instead of, as it currently is, whispering _John, John..._

Sherlock closes his eyes. Most curious, this steady itch that underlies thought but does not seek to unseat it. Is it durable? Experimentally, he imagines stepping into the shower. John smiles and moves his arms as if for an embrace – then he moves adder-swift, and Sherlock is forced to his knees, his arms twisted behind him, his head knocking against the tiles, John’s hand around his throat. 

_Yes_. Sherlock steps backwards and sits heavily onto the bed as in his mind imaginary John chokes him. His hand goes to palm his cock through his trousers, and physical sensation cuts through the vagueness of lithium that softens the edges of lust but does not extinguish it. Sherlock deepens the picture in his mind, summoning the feel of the ridged shower tray against his knees, the heat of the steam swirling around him. Water roars in his ears, and he is held by John’s violence, and John’s skill. The pain wakes a sweet fire in his balls. The humiliation stokes it, as John grinds against his shoulder, growling possession. Yes.

Sherlock opens his eyes. The hotel room is placid and bland around him. The shower is still running beyond the door. It seems that he can feel, within limits. He can desire, without being desperate. Odd. Workable and odd.

 _Don’t push it_ , John said. But he’ll never know how his mind behaves on lithium if he doesn’t experiment. The risk is his to take. He wants John, if John still wants him.

 

**John**

With a little rush of abandon, John leaves the bathroom door ajar. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and he felt good as they walked home hand in hand. Sherlock surely knows that if he wants to start vanilla, that’s OK. A shower grope would do it. They can even stay vanilla for a while, if that’s the issue here. 

But apparently it’s not. John ends up wishing he’d shut the door, because at least then he could have a wank – doing it audibly would make him seem like a passive-aggressive twat. So after ten minutes’ waiting he gives his half-mast cock a single, sour tug then switches off the water and pads across the bathroom to lean against the edge of the sink, telling himself his leg doesn’t hurt. He squeezes shut his eyes, forces himself to relax body and mind, because he wasn’t expecting anything... 

When John opens his eyes, Sherlock is partly visible in the misted glass above the sink.

‘Still want me?’ he says.

John stares at him, the clear face and hair and the body that is a misty blur but clearly naked. ‘Yes,’ he says, carefully and distinctly. Then he makes himself go on: ‘Sherlock, if you’re pretending for my sake...’

Sherlock makes a contemptuous sound, then he’s behind John, one hand snaking around his waist. He kisses John’s shoulder. ‘Tell me how you want me,’ he says.

Oh, God. That hand on John’s hip, moving down. ‘You... know how,’ he replies.

‘Tell me,’ Sherlock insists. His tone is shot through with genuine desire, yet what moves John is the undertow of fear. It’s the fear that wells up when your assumptions are ripped away, and you come back strange to yourself.

John remembers that fear. Enough.

‘I want you in pain,’ John says.

It’s true. They value the truth. They need it. As he speaks it aloud, desire crawls up John’s spine, and as it reaches the base of his neck Sherlock plants a kiss there, bowing his head. He kisses again, and again, moving gradually downwards, and lets out a sound that’s a little like a sob but more like something releasing deep inside him. He bends, moving his hands to John’s hips, then he’s licking a trail down John’s back. John shudders, the memory of scenes already played sparking through his brain.

‘In pain,’ he repeats. ‘I – want it. And you?’

It’s as much as John can do to speak evenly. He hears Sherlock slipping to his knees.

‘Yes,’ Sherlock says. Then he’s kissing the small of John’s back, alternating gentle pecks with full-on suckling of the tender area at the top of his cleft.

John accepts. Either he trusts Sherlock, or... no. He trusts Sherlock, and however aroused he is he also trusts himself to stop if need be. He feels the brush of hair on the tender skin of his inner thigh as Sherlock cricks his head to the side, and soft, wet warmth begins lapping at John’s arsehole.

John groans. His body seems to rearrange itself around the delicious sensation.

‘Then I am going to hurt you. So much,’ he promises. Ideas are forming. Most for the future, a few for now. Dark, sweet intent.

There’s something like a laugh from behind him, and Sherlock’s hands flex around John’s hips. John covers the left one with his own. For half a minute he gently strokes the long fingers as Sherlock licks and kisses... then John grabs his wrist, drags it forward and slams it down on the edge of the sink. 

John presses down. Sherlock’s wrist is pinned between his palm and the porcelain rim. John’s growl and Sherlock’s whimper blend in the air. A jolt of electricity rocks them. Sherlock removes his right hand as if uncertainly from John’s hip – and John grabs it, clamping it into place like the left. He threads the tips of his fingers between the bases of Sherlock’s, listening to the hiss of flesh as Sherlock adjusts his balance on the tiles. 

‘Harder. Push your tongue further in. Fuck me with it,’ John orders, and the coldness of his own commands is fire and bliss in his belly. He was half-hard before this; he’s dripping now, as Sherlock, breathing harshly, struggles to insert his tongue deeper. John is hurting him, humiliating him. He came to John for this. And John has Sherlock’s intimate, wriggling, urgent warmth inside. It's so much, so soon, but he want it all now, to make it theirs again, with no going back. 

This coming back to life is violent bliss. John drags Sherlock’s left hand away from the sink now and wraps it around his own cock. Their two left hands work together while John increases the pressure on Sherlock’s still-trapped wrist, staring down at the long fingers that jut out delicate and helpless, then he closes his eyes, and against his lids he sees Sherlock on his knees, tongue in John’s arse, hand on John’s cock, serving, suffering, intent. John orgasms, head jerking, body lurching to the side until he manages to lean against the edge of the bath, dimly aware of Sherlock scrambling out of his way.

A few moments pass. John’s breathing slows. He straightens himself against the shower, reaches for a nearby roll of toilet paper and deals with the worst of the mess on his stomach and around the sink. Then he looks round for Sherlock.

Sherlock is sitting naked in the middle of the floor, leaning back on his hands. His eyes are wide, his legs splayed to show off his erection.

‘Thank you,’ he says, as if humbly, while his cock bobs, blatantly suggestive. A little topping from the bottom there: John might punish that, another day.

Now, shaky-limbed but clear-headed, he kneels down and pushes Sherlock onto his back. John’s knees press Sherlock’s thighs apart, his hands pin Sherlock’s forearms, and when Sherlock tips back his head the temptation to bite his neck is only resisted by means of remembering that visible marks and press attention don’t mix.

‘Mouth,’ John orders. Sherlock brings his lips into range, and John closes in. Their tongue-tips play together, and then John dives into Sherlock. Faint but clear he tastes acrid traces of himself inside his lover - dirty. Real. Sherlock squirms and groans, caged between John’s body and the floor. John’s softened cock brushes Sherlock’s half-hard one as they writhe. 

‘Hurt me more,’ Sherlock blurts when John pulls back. 

_Yes_ , is John’s instinctive response. He wants to give Sherlock everything he’s asking for, and more than he can handle – scening was John’s idea. But they’re leaving in hours. ‘In London,’ he promises. ‘We can’t get too bashed up for travelling.’ Not to mention for facing everyone from Mrs Hudson to the national press.

Sherlock growls. The sound is as imperiously frustrated as if he was intimidating a suspect, and it makes John laugh. Sherlock sulking for lack of a masochistic fuck – he’d almost forgotten that things could be like this. Normal, for them. He can’t bear to entirely waste it.

And there are some things they can do here and now.

‘Kneel here and bring yourself off,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen you do it for yourself.’

Sherlock looks surprised. ‘All right,’ he responds, just soon enough that John doesn’t start to worry that he’s asked something more difficult than he imagined. 

Sherlock arranges himself on the bathmat with his legs splayed wide. John gives him a signal to wait and exits the bathroom to quickly rummage in his bag for a set of clover clamps.

‘To make things harder,’’ he says, coming back. ‘Or easier,’ he adds. Somehow for Sherlock it seems to be both. It would never work for John: the times he’s tried pain on himself, it did nothing but hurt.

He crouches down in front of Sherlock and fits the clamp to his nipples. Sherlock hisses and sways, but starts to stroke himself when John points to his cock. He tugs at his foreskin, then pulls at the length, narrowing his varicoloured eyes.

John is fascinated. A prickle of electricity shoots through him. This is primal, in a different way from fucking Sherlock himself. 

‘Watch _me_ ,’ John barks, as Sherlock’s eyelids slip nearly closed. Sherlock almost jumps to attention, and stares. ‘Hurt yourself,’ John orders, and finds himself biting his lip to keep still and stern as Sherlock raises his long-fingered hand, grasps the chain and pulls. His tautened nipples sway as his body moves to the rhythm of his strokes. His eyes are fixed on John.

‘You’re mine,’ says John. At the sight of Sherlock hungry and obedient, heat is rising in his throat. Words surface. ‘I’m going to hurt and humiliate you. Chains and whips and punishment, Sherlock. Remember the blood tests in Croatia – did you think I just wanted to bareback? You’re going to bleed.’ 

John shifts from crouching to kneeling, and as Sherlock continues thrusting into his own hand, John stares into his wide, fierce eyes. ‘Yes,’ Sherlock gasps, on the crest of a ragged breath, but John hears _I will hold you to that._

They will hold each other to it, he suspects.

For long minutes they stay in position, Sherlock touching himself, John several times telling him to slow down and occasionally to speed up. On the one occasion John tells him to stop completely, Sherlock looks dazed, short-circuited by frustrated desire, but he does obey. John’s heart tightens in his chest. Then he slaps Sherlock’s face, but only hard enough to jar him; they can’t have marks. ‘Just take that as a promise,’ he says. ‘All right, touch yourself again. Think of me.’

John allows Sherlock several long, trembling pulls on his cock. He’s visibly getting close now, and switches to thumbing the head. John reaches out to caress Sherlock’s cheek and allow his fingers to be clumsily kissed. Then he grabs Sherlock’s hair and drags his head forward, moving his own too, so they both end up staring down at Sherlock’s grip on the taut chain and Sherlock’s other hand tugging his swollen cock. John reaches in and wraps his own free hand around Sherlock’s thigh, digging in nails.

‘Come. Now,’ John instructs.

Sherlock continues frantically rubbing himself. He shudders, rising up on his knees as if to escape the new pain in his thigh. John moves with him, then drags him back down. Sherlock keeps working, and lets out a short, high, desperate noise. One of the clover clamps slips from his nipple and swings free. 

His frustration is probably not just about John’s teasing. Lithium can make it difficult or even impossible to come. John bites Sherlock’s shoulder, praying it’s the former.

Finally Sherlock goes rigid and cries out. John briefly lets go of him to see his cock spurt and pulse as he convulses, head rolling on his neck to gaze half-at, half-through John with such a stunned, wondering expression that John’s heart lurches into his throat. John wraps his arms around Sherlock, and when he slumps down John draws him into an awkward, kneeling hug, fumbling to release the remaining clamp from his nipple. 

Sherlock lets out a whimper, then settles against John, burrowing his head into John’s neck. John kisses his hair, and murmurs something so sappy he’s afraid Sherlock will pull away. But he doesn’t. He brings up a sticky hand to clasp John’s back.

‘Felt good,’ Sherlock murmurs, then lets out a low hum that sounds remarkably like a purr. 

‘Looked good,’ says John. He’s received a gift; the sight of Sherlock struggling to obey him even when lithium got in the way. The wounds of what they’ve been through are still fresh. John half-suspects they’re one of the things making Sherlock receptive.

And the receptivity won’t last. When they pack their belongings for the flight, they’ll be packing away part of themselves, too. John has something to say, and after enjoying the moment for as long as he can, he decides to say it.

‘You aren’t cured, Sherlock.’

Sherlock’s head shoots up. Overshoots in fact, and he arches his neck to sit back against the bath, glaring warily at John. ‘Your point?’ he asks, suddenly stiff.

Fuck, John hates this. But it’s important. ‘You have bipolar and we need to monitor it, that’s all. If the lithium wobbles...’

‘If the lithium wobbles, I probably die.’ Sherlock grabs the edge of the bath and pulls himself to his feet. Cursing internally, John does the same, rather more painfully. ‘It’s agony, John, and death meant relief. Just relief. If you want me to say I’m sorry, then I am.’ 

‘I don’t need that,’ says John – though he finds he did want it. ‘I just don’t want us to go back there. I’ll prescribe for you, and I’ll keep your secret, but if I’m your medical team as well as your lover, then you can’t play me. Hell, I want to be chasing criminals with you and fucking you blind when I’m eighty, and that means just saying no to insanity and suicide.’

Sherlock’s mouth quirks up, just a little, at one end. He looks John in the eyes. ‘All right. I promise,’ he says. 

 

**Sherlock**

They shower and dress, and sort through their few belongings. Finally they’re going home.

Sherlock watches out of the corner of his eye as John folds a sweater. The fact of John’s existence is difficult to square with the rest of his life, but the truth is that John has endured through Malta and St Petersburg, through murder and insanity, and now Sherlock will face his return from the dead with John beside him as well.

That knowledge is strength and peace. It seems profoundly improbable. It is real.

‘John,’ says Sherlock, just to see him look up and smile. Then there’s a kind of click inside him, and he repeats, ‘John, John, John, John,’ for the sake of the word itself, and to lure John over.

Sherlock succeeds. There is laughter, then kisses, then more of both as they drag each other onto the bed, displacing a pile of underwear.

Pleasure. Such extravagant pleasure, and he can feel it again.


	9. Extra material 1: A note on the text

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A note on a couple of my Russian references and what's behind them.

NB: I’m an enthusiastic student of Russia, but I have no other connection with the country. My russpicker madoshi has saved me from some misunderstandings. Remaining mistakes are my own.

 _Piter Raw_ has a number of themes. Sanity and sexuality are the obvious ones but I also wanted to run Sherlock and John up against another culture and see what happened. 

Historically Russian society has tended to focus on the collective above the individual, and on the faithful endurance of pain above western-style triumph over adversity. Sherlock and John are in a western story; as they see it, they are fighting towards a triumph and a happy ending. 

They can do that with their sniper-killing quest, but it’s not such a good fit for Sherlock’s bipolar. It’s a chronic illness and even on lithium Sherlock will probably be ill again. He can’t simply fight his way out of this with an intellectual battering ram. He needs to learn that there are sources of strength beyond personal willpower. I don’t think he learns the lesson very well – he literally can’t read it – but I put it in for him.

The words on the wall in Chapter 5 - _Эта женщина больна, эта женщина одна... Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает... Ночь..._ – are a quotation from the poem [Requiem](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem) by Anna Akhmatova. Their literal meaning is ‘This woman is sick, this woman is alone.... No, this is not me, it’s someone else who’s suffering... Night.’ 

As I interpret them, the first two lines are about the body-rooted reality of mental anguish, the second two are about the split which the mind makes within itself to deal with the unbearable, and the single word ‘night’ has all the implications and ambiguities it has in English: end, utter darkness, but not permanence.

Akhmatova was one of Russia’s most celebrated 20th century poets, and is heavily associated with the sufferings of St Petersburg/Leningrad: war, famine, siege, Stalinist terror. The character Sherlock Holmes (in his multiple incarnations) is a good avatar for London; Akhmatova stands for Petersburg. She writes simultaneously of herself and the city in many poems, of her personal grief (husband executed, son in a prison camp) and the vast grief of her city and nation. But she’s far from a victim figure; she not only outlived the worst of her country’s trials, but the best way to see her significance is to consider that, 300 years from now, Stalin will probably be remembered mainly as the provocation for her greatest writing, and that of a few others. She stands for dignified endurance of the unthinkable, and not for a happy ending but for testifying to what is true.

These realities are relevant to Sherlock, as he struggles with an excruciating but nevertheless far more limited burden. Akhmatova’s is the kind of voice that can keep you alive (when I’m feeling particularly ill I carry her poems around with me to remember what they stand for even if I can’t read them). Unfortunately, as he says himself, Sherlock can read the world but not the words. He’s cut off from most sources of collective strength, including art that both encompasses and transcends his experience.

Akhmatova was a tall woman with long fingers, like the one who Sherlock deduces wrote the graffiti. Whether you think the city sent its avatar to try to communicate with this tiny, uptight visitor from London, grey northern city in dialogue with grey northern city… that’s up to each reader.

John fares a little better. The words he sees, _Где же ты теперь, воля вольная?_ (‘Where are you now, free will?’) are from _Kukushka_ (Cuckoo), by the group Kino. They were active in the 1980s, and they symbolise the difficulties of life in the stagnating USSR as Akhmatova symbolises resistance to Stalinism. Like many lyrics with wide appeal, Kukushka works as both a personal and political expression: the frustration of living in a foundering and inflexible state becomes a general evocation of how it feels to live in the grasp of any sustained misery. 

Their late frontman Viktor Tsoi’s day job, which he retained while Kino were massively successful, was in a boiler room in block of flats in Leningrad. Whether John sees Tsoi out of the flat window is again up to the reader, but Kukushka represents stolidity and persistence in the face of blind pressure to give up and die or accept an unliveable life. John knows all about that. And he’s in the right country to face it.

 **Cuckoo**  
(my translation)

How many unwritten songs are left?  
Tell me cuckoo, sing.*  
Am I to live in the town or the suburbs,  
Lie like a stone or burn like a star?  
Like a star.

Chorus:  
My sun, look at me,  
My open hand has turned into a fist,  
And if there’s powder – give me a flame.  
Like that…

Who follows the lonely path?  
Strong and brave  
Heads have fallen on the field in battle.  
Few are left in blessed memory,  
In sober mind and steady-handed in the ranks,  
In the ranks.

Chorus

Where are you now, free will?  
With whom do you now  
Greet the sweet dawn?  
It’s good with you, and bad without,  
Head and shoulders are patient under the lash,  
Under the lash.

Chorus

* An old Russian belief says that if you ask the cuckoo how many years you have to live, then the number of times it cuckoos is the answer.

[Kino’s original version of Kukushka](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJItrpLE8rE)  
[Beautiful cover version by Zemfira](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93unCZvJQAQ). I’d recommend starting with this if you aren’t familiar with Tsoi.

 **Original Russian text**  
Песен еще ненаписанных, сколько?  
Скажи, кукушка, пропой.  
В городе мне жить или на выселках,  
Камнем лежать или гореть звездой?  
Звездой.  
Солнце мое - взгляни на меня,  
Моя ладонь превратилась в кулак,  
И если есть порох - дай огня.  
Вот так...  
Кто пойдет по следу одинокому?  
Сильные да смелые  
Головы сложили в поле в бою.  
Мало кто остался в светлой памяти,  
В трезвом уме да с твердой рукой в строю,  
В строю.  
Солнце мое - взгляни на меня,  
Моя ладонь превратилась в кулак,  
И если есть порох - дай огня.  
Вот так...  
Где же ты теперь, воля вольная?  
С кем же ты сейчас  
Ласковый рассвет встречаешь? Ответь.  
Хорошо с тобой, да плохо без тебя,  
Голову да плечи терпеливые под плеть,  
Под плеть.  
Солнце мое - взгляни на меня,  
Моя ладонь превратилась в кулак,  
И если есть порох - дай огня.  
Вот так...


	10. Extra material 2: Rejected version of Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the completed (to second draft level) but abandoned original version of Piter Raw Chapter 7. It’s definitely not part of the final story, but a few people asked to see it. It’s coherent and readable; just remember it’s a reject, and unedited, so won’t be up to the usual standard.  
> The action picks up at the end of the final Chapter 6, with the slight difference that in this version Chapter 6 took place outside the city instead of in a park, and John, Sherlock and Zoya didn’t jump in a car at the end.  
> There are more notes at the end regarding why this version got dumped rather than revised.

**Sherlock**

They won. All the snipers are dead. Kolyvanov lies face down in a mulch of his own gore. Happy ending?

Yes. It will be happy if Sherlock claws his throat out or hangs himself from a tree. 

That hypothesis is in error, a shred of Sherlock tells him. He tries to marshal logic behind it, but logic slips on blood. John is wounded as well, his trousers stained red, and he is holding his hands out to Sherlock, and Sherlock... gets up and stumbles away, from the corpse, from the churned snow, from the agitation and incomprehensible arguments. The Russians ignore him, or at least don’t shoot as he breaks into a directionless, snow-hampered run, and the sound of John shouting his name is not real. The lash of the wind is real as the world smears around him, snow-crushed bushes and the vast sky shading to dusk. And at the heart of it, still, his mind, a poisoned flame, decaying, brutal and bright. He wants to drown that flame, and yet he promised John not to die.

He is thinking as he runs. He is always thinking. The crux is that John kills for him, and Sherlock endangers John, and Sherlock shouted in weakness _Fucking shoot me!_ – and a man like that deserves neither life nor the mercy of death. If he could cut John away from him as if slicing off a limb then maybe he could die in peace, but John will not leave him so he does not have that right. He must find a bargain that will let him endure the next breath. 

Sherlock strips off his gloves, scarf and hat and drops them to the snow. The cold strikes so fiercely that it’s part of him almost before his senses register invasion. Yes. Flesh and anguish; like this he is better. 

He has been moving for some minutes when he comes to a minor road, cleared of snow. He steps onto the carriageway and walks down it for a while, aware that this means no footprints and therefore no pursuit. John will not have to see him like this. Protect John; yes.

Youths in a rusty Lada slow down as they pass him, and shout something doubtless imbecilic.  
Sherlock deduces their internecine relationships at a glance, which proves his intellect is working well, but if the locals are finding him odd then being on the road is dangerous. After a few minutes he exits on the far side, vaulting over a protruding rock to conceal his footprints from the unobservant, and enters a bushy copse which crests a rise and then continues beyond it.

He has been considering the abstract problem of whether mental strength is constituted in resistance to the fear of death or in resistance to its lure, but he is increasingly distracted by the fact that his skin is crawling as if with beetles and his phone is vibrating in his pocket. He can’t be sure it isn’t Kolyvanov calling from the world of the dead. His thoughts are skidding like worn cogs and _for fuck’s sake why can’t he think?_ – but he is sure that John would not want him to answer a call like that.

Sherlock reaches into his pocket and turns the phone off. He hesitates for a moment, then shrugs his coat off and lets it drop to the snow. Better. Cold claws at him as he steps forward, and this is another moment of discipline, of sufficient clarity, that enables him to review and confirm that yes, this is right, because he is doing what is needful in order to bear the suffering rather than denying it. John tells him not to deny suffering. 

There is residual comfort in Sherlock’s upper arms and it irks him so his sweater goes the way of the coat. Each forfeiture is a relief, that dissipates within seconds. He moves on, shuddering now as if his body was fighting itself. Why fight? He is apart from it.

There is a palace up ahead, rising gold, white and blue from the snow. It must be part of Tsarskoe Selo. The huge building sits back on its gaudy haunches, blank windows seeming to eye him, and at one end there is a crop of mushroom domes, sprouting like madness from order. Sherlock recoils from it with an aversion that sends him veering away at a right angle from the palace, and from a workman with a bucket who has apparently stopped to stare at him. He cannot bear to be seen. He cannot be bothered with horror, with eyes and judgement. Why did he live through last night? There’s no answer, but he sees the top of something like a half-ruined European church tower poking above a patch of evergreens ahead. If he’s shut out of death he can still be close. That is the place he will go.

Sherlock heads for the church, finding and following a narrow path. The lynchpin of the world is broken, and he is holding his mind together with his hands, so he cries out, and the sound is swallowed by snow and pine needles. Yes. He will find a peaceful churchyard like the one in his parents’ village, and he will crawl under some broken slab, and the world will finally leave him; his mother left. 

There’s a gate ahead. It’s padlocked and set into a ten-foot fence, and has a ‘НА РЕМОНТ’ sign. Sherlock knows what that means by now, even if the ‘repairs’ are seldom actually in progress. In addition, the building on the other side is not a genuine ruin but a folly, designed to appear run down. Shit. He wraps his numb fingers through the mesh. This was supposed to be refuge, but he’s trapped, with a road audible to his left, and the Catherine Palace to the right and behind him. He cannot function like this much longer. His selves split and peel away from one another in pale bands. He cannot hold himself in. To hold himself in he presses his forehead to the rusty wire, and lets John sneer in his head, _Just die, you arrogant prick._ Sherlock whispers ‘I want to,’ because John’s contempt is torture and fuel and relief. He closes his eyes, and there is his last sight of John, and John merges with Kolyvanov so that John is bleeding to death in the snow with his throat shot out.

Yes. This is almost peace. The traffic and the wind and the creak of the fence fall away from Sherlock as he experiences John’s death, and he knows this is madness, but that is no reason to refuse it, because it will rip into his brain and nest there regardless. It is relief to understand that John is dead, and Sherlock is dying; and John would not deny him relief, because John is kind. John is kind. Sherlock lurches away from the fence and presses his hands to the sides of his head and screams because John is kind, and that knowledge is a knife to his beaten brain. John is not dead, John is kind. John is...

Sherlock pulls off his shirt and throws it to the path. He leans against a spindly tree, faintly feeling the bark through his numb skin, and he is burning, slipping, losing – surely if John would die for him he should live for John? _Shame shame shame_ is coiling and choking him...

There is a rustling, a living sound.

Sherlock stills. He looks around, focusing, fear sparking in a corner of his mind. He deduces from the pattern of cracks and rustles that a large animal is heading his way. And yes, the creature – a dog, no Hound but still a big Alsatian – rounds some trees and streaks towards him, its eyes gleaming, its growl low and urgent. It’s on the far side of the fence, however, a fact which seems to enrage it as it throws itself against the barrier, barking madly now.

A bolt of animation pulses through Sherlock. His heart is pumping and his freezing body is stupidly glad of the fence, and the ridiculousness of that is... an edge of sanity that he cannot grasp. Sherlock kneels to be on a level with the animal’s frantically lunging muzzle, staring into its eyes, and he hears himself snarling back as if in someone else’s voice. The dog’s eyes are a violent orange in the twilight, and Sherlock pulls at the fence, and the animal lunges for his numb fingers, gashing them, and the blood is viscous red on Sherlock’s hand, and he pulls it back and looks from the dog to the wound. This is eternity, for him. Sickness is his self, and if he escapes for a moment or a year he will only return. The lights outside the graffiti room were chimaera, and there is no John. 

Sherlock slumps onto his back in the snow, which is shallow, just some six inches, in this relatively sheltered place. He stretches his bare arms out, burying them in cold, and snow trickles inside his ears as his head sinks down. Sounds become slightly muffled: the dog barking and scrabbling, the rasp and clang of metal and the rumble of cars are all glazed with peace. His body is freezing, and it’s not pain, because pain is finite, and he is enormity and emptiness, drowning as he lets go and sees above him the wind briefly tearing the clouds to reveal dim stars, a landscape of billowing wisps and void fringed with pine branches and blotted by a fast-flying murder of crows. The world crowds on his senses, still; the relentless traffic grinds its way to the city, to London’s white sister, with blood and word in her walls. Sherlock has abandoned walls. He is a failed seed, waiting to return to earth, and faintly inside him John’s voice is urging _Get up!_ , but there is no John. It is such a relief to deny himself John. There never was John.

Snow scalds his flesh, but the sensation dims. Feeling is passing, as it always does for the logical mind. He can deduce the world down to atoms, if only it will show itself. He has absolute control and will rise above. The guard dog has paused in its barking and settles on its paws to watch him. He has no energy. Is something wrong with him? Yes, he deduces by comparison between new and existing data that something is wrong with him. He will consider it. His mind will... he will work on it... 

 

**John**

It takes John over half an hour to get to the place where Sherlock was last seen.

First the _localtsy_ hold him back as he tries to limp after Sherlock, barely upright on his bleeding right leg. Only after she’s finished arguing with Gleb over what to do with Kolyvanov – just leave him there, apparently – does Zoya jog after Sherlock. She returns carrying his hat, scarf and gloves, saying his footprints stopped at a road so he must have flagged down a car Russian-style and paid the driver to take him somewhere. 

John swears in her face; he knows she’s not the problem, but oh God, to hell with his wound, he felt such relief, and such happiness, and it’s gone. Sherlock is gone. He’s switched his phone off. 

‘He’s throwing his _clothes_ away? He’s suicidal!’ John shouts, earning himself uninterested glances from the other Russians. Then, in a lower voice, he adds: ‘Do you want him alive to pay you or not?’

Zoya’s lips go thin. If John’s offended her, he isn’t sorry. Maybe these are her people, but he needs her help.

‘Of course I want him alive, but he is adult. What can you do, run to look for him?’ She points at John’s leg.

‘Just help me get this patched up, and we’ll see,’ John assures her.

Gleb comes over at that point. John hasn’t had much attention to spare for the new bandit boss, but what he sees now confirms that this is no Kolyvanov. Gleb regards John with an obvious if phlegmatic dislike, but informs him via Zoya that he has no interest in John’s affairs whatsoever as long as he and Sherlock keep quiet and get out of St Petersburg as soon as possible.

‘Got it. Then help me find him,’ John says – and falls over.

There follows a Zoya-mediated argument about wasting time going to a clinic, which ends when one of the bandits brings a roll of bandages and disinfectant and John rips his trousers open and patches up his own damn leg. The wound needs stitches but that will have to wait. He’s dimly aware that his competence is getting him some bandit respect... then it also gets him an unknown number of minutes slumped against a tree trunk lightheaded with pain. When he gets over himself sufficiently, he realises the Russian men have gone. He’s left with Zoya, and the dead Kolyvanov.

‘You are all right?’ says Zoya. ‘I was about to carry you to the car.’

‘Yes, yes,’ says John. ‘Don’t do that. Where is everyone?’

I sent them away,’ Zoya replies. ‘My uncle offered to give us two men to help, but I didn’t like the men who volunteered. Without Gleb, I think they would shoot us because they respected Kolyvanov.’ She shrugs.

OK. John closes his eyes again for a moment. Part of him wants to take hold of this alarming new Zoya and squash her back into her nice landlady box, but a larger part of him relates. He is similarly used to assessing which survivors of mortared villages might want to kill him.

‘Right. Then we’ll find Sherlock,’ he says. ‘Could you, ah, get me a stick? To lean on.’ He hasn’t used a cane since... since... well, he needs one now.

Zoya finds him a bit of branch, and brushes the snow off him as he struggles to his feet. 

‘You are brave,’ she says, and points at the sky. ‘But there is a storm coming. It’s better if you come to my apartment and rest. If your friend got into a car he could be anywhere.’

‘No! He’s in the area,’ says John. ‘He... he wouldn’t go.’ It’s a poor explanation, but instinct is telling him that Sherlock doesn’t have the will to go far from him at the moment. ‘We’ll follow the footprints, Zoya. Sherlock can deduce anything from looking at tiny details. I’ve learnt from him. Show me what you saw.’

Zoya is clearly sceptical about this claim of detective skill. Frankly John is too – but the alternative is getting in the car and he suspects that if he does that she’ll override his objections and drive him to a clinic. She means well, but instinct kept him alive the last time he was shot, and he’ll trust it now.

The winter sun has almost set. As John limps along, seeing nothing but Sherlock’s prints and the elongated shadows of the trees dotted along the field’s edge, he’s glad that he has a local with him, and that his wounded leg is the one that was dodgy already. Because of the cold it doesn’t hurt as much as it might, which means he only has lava running up and down the inside of his thigh instead of actually being immobilised.

‘Maybe I can’t save him,’ John says. ‘I mean, who actually saves anybody? But I’ll have tried.’

He seems to have spoken without deciding to do it, and his voice sounds slightly tinny. It’s clear why: his body temperature is only going one way, the opposite to the weather. Well, all that matters is getting to Sherlock. Thank God for Zoya, plodding along beside him, matching his pathetic pace and steadying him by the elbow more than once. She must want her second payment, but the tension he senses in her is more humane than that.

‘I know you’ve got no reason to like Sherlock,’ John says. He’s groping for a question that he doesn’t know quite how to ask.

‘I read the articles about him, and I think he’s admirable,’ Zoya replies. ‘I would not want to live with him, true. But sometimes an arrogant man will love one other person very much. To everyone else he is an arsehole, and yet he adores the one person. You believe that the situation is permanent.’

John is silent. He understands two things: that Zoya is talking about her ex-husband, and that the analogy is valid for himself. He no longer questions Sherlock’s love for him... but how can any normal emotion survive all this? Even if lithium or some other drug reprieves them, will Sherlock really come back, and will John be able to accept it all? He doesn’t know.

‘I kill for him,’ he says, instead of answering Zoya direct. ‘I killed Hope and Zagami and Tabone, and I just killed an _afganets_.’ 

There’s bitter satisfaction in the enormity of what he leaves unsaid: _I am an afganets_. Afghanistan feels strangely close now, partly because he is not doing too well on the fever front, and also because Kolyvanov was there, and shared a part of John, and John killed him for Sherlock. John chooses Sherlock, utterly, but they are human. Sherlock is mad, and may be dying or dead. John can’t find him. What is left?

His mind is wandering from the real business of scanning the ground. He forces it back with a shiver of self-contempt, because if Sherlock can fight the dissolution of his mind then John can deal with having a fucking temperature. He blinks hard, and spots a slightly scuffed area to the side of Sherlock’s tracks.

‘That is where I found his hat and gloves,’ Zoya says. 

John examines the area, leaning over as best he can, trying to deduce something. As he peers at the bland whiteness, flakes start descending around him and settling into Sherlock’s prints.  
The only conclusion he comes up with is that Zoya trailed the scarf across the snow when she collected it.

‘I can’t see anything useful,’ he admits. He straightens up with a jerk, and has to grit his teeth against the pain. Zoya is regarding him with shrewd concern, and as he tries to start off faster his stick slips on ice hidden under the snow and she has to support him, and _fuck_ this total fucking uselessness. They have to press on.

They walk for a few minutes in silence. The light has nearly gone, and John slips again, and sparks cross his vision as he rights himself while Zoya is distracted, scanning the murky horizon. He feels both desperate and increasingly detached. An hour or so of snow and all trace of Sherlock will be erased, as if he’d never been here. John could imagine that to be true: he’s back in his bedsit, in an antidepressant-induced nightmare.

But his nightmares are always of the past. He has a future now. He just has to keep it alive.

‘There is the road,’ says Zoya, indicating ahead. ‘We stay there fifteen minutes, and if we find nothing I get the car and we go to my apartment.’

John wants to argue, but her voice is firm and a wave of nausea distracts him. He can’t deny that if he gets any worse he really will be useless. Perhaps better to retreat than to let that happen. So he struggles to the road, and then stands by the place where the footprints peter out into carriageway that is salted clear.

Nothing moves. There’s no traffic here. The snowfall is increasing, and if it wasn’t for a dog barking in the distance John could believe they are the only creatures left in the world. 

He sits down by the final pair of prints. It’s rash, and he might not get up again, but at least he won’t fall over, and he can examine the evidence more closely. His leg is on fire, which ought to help with the fact that everything else is freezing, except it doesn’t. God, what is he doing? It’s almost fully dark now, but the white ground and drifting flakes create a sort of fake brightness that makes him feel like he’s inside a snowglobe. It is surreal, and distracting, and as a lone car passes, its headlights dazzling, John is momentarily mesmerised. There is pain, and cold, and fear, and he can hardly think, and he _must think_.

‘How can you bear this place?’ he demands of Zoya, just to keep from sinking inside himself.

‘Piter?’ Zoya sounds offended. ‘This is the best city in Russia! You only see the stupid bandits. Come back in the white nights.’

John wonders what the hell this is if not a bloody white night. But he doesn’t actually care just now. What he cares about is the intuition tickling at the edge of his mind. 

‘Look,’ he says. ‘These footprints are the same as all the others behind them. Sherlock pressed down on the balls of his feet and moved on. He didn’t stand here waiting for a car to come along. He stepped straight out into the road. That means he either crossed, or doubled back on himself further down.’

Zoya holds her scarf in place as she leans over to peer at the prints. ‘Or he stood on the road and then got into a car,’ she says, but there’s doubt in her voice now.

John blinks his snow-caked eyelashes. ‘He wouldn’t have dumped his hat and things and then done that, Zoya – looking weird makes it less likely that someone would pick him up. He dumped them because... because he’s really fucking ill, but that means he’s still somewhere here.’ 

‘Hm,’ says Zoya, crossing the road and then turning to look back at him. ‘OK, John, if you really think he’s near and he has hurt himself, I move a lot faster than you can now. Do you want me to look along – ’

John gestures for silence. Yes he does want her to, but most of all he wants to think. He hauls himself to his feet, bracing against the blast of pain, and forces himself to study the road and the piled up snow at its side, just as Sherlock would. Sherlock would be equal to this. Sherlock would spot details even in this nightmare. But Sherlock is not here now. And although Sherlock is out of his mind, he’s still quite capable of going to ground to hide how broken he is. John knows that impulse. 

Sherlock is wandering, or collapsed, freezing, without John. Why the fuck did he throw his scarf and hat and gloves away? No, that may be what hurts most, but it’s not the important thread to follow. Sherlock was not acting rationally, but John must use reason to find him. _Think_ , says Sherlock’s voice in John’s head. _Analyse. Don’t just see, observe. Use all the data_. The tarmac swims in front of John’s eyes. Snowflakes dance and spin.

‘Zoya,’ he says. ‘Why’s that dog keep barking like that?’

 

**John**

For a minute, John hobbles after Zoya, but while he was sitting by the road his leg seems to have been completely replaced by a mixture of jelly and pain. The inadequate stick slips out of his hand and he half-collapses, trying to fix in his head that he’s not in the Hindu Kush, and he’s shivering so bloody much, and there’s actually a blizzard now, and when he looks at his watch twice in succession he seems to lose five minutes between the first and second time.

He has made a choice, he realises. Zoya will find Sherlock, or not, and come back to get John, or not. In the distance the dog’s barking has gone from an occasional burst to a sustained volley, which suggests she has at least reached her destination.

John checks the bandage around his thigh, and tries to tighten it. Fucking agony. Where is he? Oh yes, Sherlock wandered off, which is typical of Sherlock, vanishing into his own head after all that. Malta and heat and guns... A flood of memory fills John: Sherlock mad and raging, Sherlock dead on the pavement, Sherlock in his arms in orgasm and pain; Sherlock weeping on the floor of a Valletta house, their foreheads together. They promised to fight, and they did. Their enemies are dead now. And they are lost. 

They are reliant on other people. One other, at least. 

In the Army, John learnt to trust implicitly. Soldiers look out for each other because they are paid, and also because it’s right and they’re mates. That’s part of who John is... but Sherlock would tell him it’s not part of the real world. Zoya has been away for fifteen minutes, and the dog is quiet again; why did John send her there instead of along the road? Anyway, she already has half her money, and if she’s sensible she will return to the car and drive away from the madness and blood and the danger of Kolyvanov loyalists taking her out along with John.

She’s really gone, he realises, the world starting to blur around him. Sherlock’s gone too, and maybe that was inevitable from the moment John saw him with the cabbie’s pill. A broken soldier can’t save a madman; they don’t fit. Obsession is not salvation. John is weak for trusting... Weak, and there is blood all down his leg. He did love Sherlock. He’s glad of that, even if it wasn’t enough.

John is dozing, burning, fading out when he jerks his head up for the twentieth time and sees a bulky shape emerging from the twilight.

Sherlock is wrapped in Zoya’s coat, and carried in her arms. He’s dead, John understands, but he feels nothing; while the pain does exist it must be someone else feeling it, because he couldn’t bear it, not again. He simply watches as Zoya approaches him as if in a dream and trudges straight past through the calf-high snow. Stripped to her sweater and crowned with white, she’s visibly struggling with Sherlock’s long body. That’ll be why she’s heading straight for the roadside – if she stops now, she won’t lift Sherlock again.

John scrambles slowly, three-limbed, after her. She makes it to the roadside, and clears away a patch of snow to reveal bright green grass in the erratic light of the mobile phone which she’s fixed in her breast pocket to serve as a torch. She lays Sherlock’s head and torso here, and when John reaches her she’s fitting her gloves on him, though they’re far too small for his long hands. 

There’s no blood on Sherlock’s face this time. His lips are blue and his eyes are closed. In a moment John will kiss him, which he couldn’t do before, so this death is better. He’s glad of that.

‘I think he has, ah... _obmorozhenie_ ,’ says Zoya, making a claw with her hand and then pulling at the tips of the fingers. ‘You understand? But not too bad. He will not lose flesh.’

A car speeds past on the road, illuminating her through the dancing snow. Now Zoya’s no longer exerting herself, she is shivering so badly her voice shakes, but John can still make the words out. They seem to get part-way into his mind, then stop. John can only understand that they create a lightness deep inside him. Also, that Zoya is beautiful. He wants to wake Sherlock and tell him that: _look at the world. Share it with me._

Because Sherlock is not dead. John manages one more awkward lurch forward to collapse with his head on Sherlock’s chest. It’s bare under the too-small coat, and the skin is warm.

‘I phoned for the ambulance,’ Zoya says. ‘You come to me and I look after you, yes. But I never take tourists in again, my God.’

John should give first aid. Just now though, anything which requires moving is off the cards. Apparently he can’t speak, either. Darkness is taking him, and all that remains, in one ear, is Sherlock’s steady heartbeat. In the other, Zoya starts to sing, in defiance of her shivers:

 _Pesen yeshyo nenapisenikh, skolko..._ *

A Russian song, unknowable and clear. The words blur and wrap around them, and John lets go.

 

* This is ‘Kukushka’ – see the Note on the Text

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got dumped after I sent it to my first beta for comments to help me with major revisions and she said to kill it instead.
> 
> There were two main reasons. Chloe said it was melodramatic, which I was anticipating and which can usually be fixed, but she also said that the action of the story should stay within the city, preferably bringing the prologue full circle. I could see the narrative logic in the latter point, and the only way to do that was to change the content of the chapter completely. So I did.
> 
> I was unsure whether I shouldn’t have tried to save this one , though, and to some extent I still am. I wasn’t able to write a new Chapter 7 with the same level of intensity. It took too much out of me the first time. The revised version is quieter. 
> 
> The main difference between the drafts is that Sherlock gets better in the final Ch7, while in this earlier version he gets madder. I wanted to drive him to the point where his behaviour as well as his thinking becomes clearly ‘mad’, which is an excruciating line to cross. But Chloe reported that it’s not clear why he’s behaving as he does. And reading back I can see a) his behaviour is more mixed state than depressive, which is out of sync, and b) it’s not clear what his motivation in running off is. Then again, it’s not clear what his motivation in running off is in the final Ch7, but (I think) that works. Maybe the difference is indeed the setting.
> 
> Final Ch7 feels like part of a rational healing process; old Ch7 feels like yet more frightening chaos plus some luck. To be honest the latter is more true to my experience of bipolar, and like a lot else in the fic, the basics are from my own 2003 visit to Piter. But just because something happened to me it doesn’t mean it belongs in the story. I think on the whole I did well building a rational narrative about madness but maybe I found my limits here and had to step back.
> 
> The plan for Chapter 8 was that Sherlock and John were going to wake up in a medical facility, and it would turn out that the lithium had kicked in while Sherlock was unconscious. So the moment the lithium changes Sherlock’s interior landscape wouldn’t have been in the narrative. I’m pretty sure that’s a gain. But it is a rational moment. It’s the wild moments that draw me.


	11. Chapter 11

Commission from the Prologue by [Gregory Welter](http://gregory-welter.deviantart.com)

"Curious and split"

[](http://s21.photobucket.com/user/annapotamus/media/tumblr_nlkef9O2Fi1rp2npwo1_1280.jpg.html)

Commission from Chapter 5 by [Gregory Welter](http://gregory-welter.deviantart.com)

"Where are you now, free will?"

[](http://s21.photobucket.com/user/annapotamus/media/tumblr_nlw8miaqMM1rp2npwo1_1280.jpg.html)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The sky is sparkling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7332508) by [Bronze_blade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bronze_blade/pseuds/Bronze_blade)
  * [Piter Raw [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11148141) by [songlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin)




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